Country Images Magazine North Edition November 2017 | Page 22

Enhance
beauty of
The Lost Houses
of Derbyshire
by Maxwell Craven
Th e building photographed in 1894 by Richard Keene, Junior from a similar angle to
the 1855 picture at the beginning of this article. [Rod Jewell]
Award winning
HAND MADE
timber windows and doors
Copy by A J Keene of an eighteenth
century painting of Full Street
showing the almshouses as built.
M.Craven]
devoted to the purposes of
charity, are sacrifi ced to a style of
architecture, that would be more
in character when employed in
the entrance to a nobleman’s
park or pleasure grounds….
who dresses a pauper in lace,
instead of the modest elegance
which ought to have dignifi ed
the front….we are treated to
an ostentatious display of the
Duke’s arms and crest as the
leading objects.’
Th e site in 1960 seen from the rear of the Cathedral, taken by the late Frank Sharratt.
[M. Craven]
(which we would call an almshouse) went up in
forty four weeks, during which time the twelve
elderly paupers had to be billeted elsewhere, as we
know from the fact that Pickford had to claim for
the cost of arranging this as well as the cost of the
building itself !
Nor was all well from the point of view of the
cottages to others for profi t!
None of this can have helped spare the building
from the depredations of the Council, who
sought to demolish the Hospital to extend H I
Steven’s handsome Baths next door. Hence in
1895, the entire building was purchased from
the Duke and demolished, only for the plan to
extend the baths to be dropped shortly aft er in
favour of new baths at Reginald Street, by the
Arboretum. In the end, the site was built over in
1920 by an extension to the municipal electricity
undertaking, a building of unsurpassed ugliness
not fi nally cleared until 1971. Today it remains a
rather municipalised space but host to Anthony
Stones’s spectacular equestrian statue of Bonnie
Prince Charlie presented to the City by the late
Lionel Pickering and unveiled in December 1995.
original
intentions, for a later visitor images readers
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Ooh-er, missus!
Hutton gives credit to none of Pickford’s Derby
buildings, and one can only assume that they
cordially detested each other. Th e new Hospital
22 | CountryImagesMagazine.co.uk
wrote:
%
‘We were then informed that
their abode was optional and
that they had the discretionary
powers of letting their
apartments or gardens to others.’
all timber windows
& doors until 30th
century this became the
norm,
September
2017
Later, in the 19 th
Bess’s pensioners going off to stay with their
children or grandchildren and letting their