Westholme House


Westholme House is a historic building in the English market town of Sleaford in Lincolnshire, set in 32 acres of parkland and school grounds. Built around 1849 in the style of a French Gothic mansion by Charles Kirk for his business partner Thomas Parry, it was privately owned until the 1940s, when Kesteven County Council acquired the house and its grounds. It subsequently served as the county library and part of Sleaford Secondary Modern School. The stone house follows an asymmetrical layout and incorporates a range of Gothic elements in its design. In 1974, it was recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade II listed building, recognising it as of "special interest".

History

Prior to the enclosure of Sleaford in 1794, the lands that later became the Westholme estate were mostly open fields. The largest was Puddingpan Race behind the houses on Westgate, thought to be named for the muddy puddles that formed there. That field was bounded to the north by Drove Lane, a track running to South Rauceby, and parts of the future estate also included "Millgatemere Furlong" to the north west and claypits to the north east. Following the enclosure, Drove Lane was straightened and moved northwards by a third of a mile; the old open fields were reorganised within this new space, producing straight, geometric boundary lines. The future Westholme grounds were divided up between several land-owners, including Lord Bristol and Benjamin Handley.

Private ownership

, an architect, builder and future Member of Parliament for Boston, had purchased the estate by 1846; he employed his business partner and brother-in-law, Charles Kirk the younger, to design Westholme House on the site for him; their firm Kirk and Parry completed the mansion around 1849. Parry moved in with his wife, mother and sister, and employed two servants; by 1871, two domestic workers had been added to his household. Parry died in 1879 followed by his wife, Henrietta, in 1882.
Henry Peake was occupying Westholme by 1885. Peake was a solicitor who served as clerk to the county magistrates, and was a partner in the local law firm Peake, Snow and Peake, along with his son Henry Arthur Peake. The partnership had connections with Kirk and Parry, and Peake married Eliza, a daughter of Charles Kirk the elder. After his death, Peake's sons, George Herbert and Henry Arthur, successively occupied the house in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. During the First World War, Henry Arthur and his wife, Alice Ann, lost three of their sons in battle. In 1923, Henry Arthur died while staying at Hastings. He and his wife were planning to sell Westholme and move to Guildford before his death; she did so and died there in 1933. The businessman and Liberal politician Samuel Pattinson lived at the house from at least 1924. His wife, Betsy Sharpley Pattinson, also died in 1942 and their trustees auctioned off the furniture at Westholme two years later.

Public ownership

Westholme was occupied by the military during the Second World War. Kesteven County Council had acquired the property and its parkland by 1945 and proposed to use it for educational purposes. The council wanted to convert the house into Kesteven County Library, but it had to wait for the War Department to agree to pay fees for "dilapidations" caused during its occupancy. The Department provisionally agreed on £1,276 16s in 1947 and the library was operating at the house by 1949. A Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes canteen supplied school meals after the war; and in 1947 the council bought a series of huts on the site from the War Department.
In 1957, the council planned to open a new mixed secondary modern at Westholme and, by 1960, Sleaford Secondary Modern School was operating there alongside its original buildings on Church Lane. In 1983, an extension to the Westholme block opened, allowing the school to close the old site; new teaching blocks were then built around the grounds. The school changed its name to St George's School in 1984, became a technology college in 1992 and converted to St George's Academy in 2010. The house continued to be used as a library into the 1980s, but by the next decade, had become the school's sixth form base and an adult education centre. As a result of major rebuilding work at St George's in 2011–12, a new sixth form centre opened and Westholme House was converted into the school's administrative centre.

Architecture

Charles Kirk and Thomas Parry were builders and architects in Sleaford; their company prospered in the mid-19th century and was responsible for a number of civic, religious and corporate buildings in the town, including the gas works, Carre's Grammar School and Carre's Hospital. Westholme has been called their "most cheerfully inventive" building; built in the style of a Gothic château, Pevsner described the mansion as "an ebullient essay in French domestic Gothic."
The two-storey house is built in coursed stone with steep, Welsh slate roofing. Its asymmetrical design incorporates an eclectic range of Gothic elements, including tall, polygonal chimney stacks, a four-centred arch doorway, dragon motifs and carved pinnacles. The eastern façade includes two gables with a tall four-centred arch window. To the right is a tower of three-storeys with a pointed roof which connects to a projecting bay of two storeys. The bay incorporates a stack of three square windows topped with a Flamboyant arch, two hipped roofs with decorative spikes, and three chimneys. The rear is more simple; the windows are mullioned and most are square, except for three bay windows. It has two wings laid out like half an "H", which each have a gable and embattled parapets.
The site also houses a Gothic stable-block, which Sir Nikolaus Pevsner considered "charming", and two Tudor-style lodges. A stretch of wall in the grounds is 100m long and made up of stone fragments, many Gothic, which were most likely taken from church restorations conducted by Kirk and Parry.