20 C O N T E X T 1 1 5 : J U LY 2 0 1 0 Rosalind Willatts New life for Scraptoft Hall Scraptoft Hall in Leicestershire, a country seat of 1723, is set for its third life, following ministerial approval for a care home after a controversial called-in appeal. Now lying incongruously on the edge of Leicester, Scraptoft Hall illustrates the problems of finding a use for elegant country houses now in semi-urban settings, when the social context which created and maintained them and their estates had died in the 20th century. When in 1723 the widow Laetitia Wigley built a handsome classical house in the village where her family had long been principal landowners, it was in open countryside.The house was close to the village church, but stood back from the village. Its stone west façade was separated by a great wrought-iron screen, linked to the house by 60m-long formal redbrick walls, which created a rare clairevoie. Thus framed, the house was seen from the village, but stood apart from it. Laetitia Wigley’s son was responsible for planting many trees in the park. A bas-relief on the sarcophagus of his marble wall-memorial (1765) in the church shows ‘Mr Wigley in his plantations giving directions to some old servants who are busily employed in digging and planting young trees in the ground’. In 1798, Nichols described Scraptoft as ‘a plain building surrounded by delightful groves, which extend over more than 100 acres of land and, by the liberality of the owner, are a pleasing place of excursion in the summer for the inhabitants of Leicester, from which the distance is above four miles’. Over half a kilometre from the house, in an area of woodland, a mound was built from soil excavated from a lake and pond. The mound contained a shell grotto and was surmounted by a revolving chinoiserie gazebo. Spiral paths led up to this. From here the landscape could be viewed. Nothing remains of the gazebo and the shell grotto suffered student-ignited fires in the 1980s, but the mound remains in unkempt woodland with faint lines of the spiral paths. In the 1950s Scraptoft changed from private house to tertiary education use. The estate and hall became the City of Leicester Teacher Training College, evolving in the late 1960s into the Leicester Polytechnic. Many large residential and other blocks were built over Wigley’s ‘delightful groves’. The stables were insensitively turned into classrooms, and other outbuildings into offices. Much of the hall itself was altered with institutional insertions. In 1990 it became part of De Montfort University (DMU). For some years there was much activity on site, with plans for more buildings. DMU’s building conservation and forestry expertise were not applied to the site. But after 13 years, DMU withdraw from its city-edge campus. In 1994, the special relationship of the hall, church and parsonage with the village was recognised when a conservation area was designated. But a request to English Heritage to register the park and garden was refused. DMU then sold the area of 1960s institutional buildings for housing, leaving all the heritage assets divorced from their land, with no vehicular access, even for lawnmowers, to half of the remnant site. The mount and the woodland around it, which was subsequently made subject to tree preservation orders, were not sold.Without attached development land, the problems of restoring and finding a satisfactory future for the heritage assets were magnified. Having put the hall up for sale with a high street estate agent, with no acceptable offers, DMU made arrangements with a development company to acquire the site, once planning permission was gained for conversion to flats and dwellings. The principle of conversion of the stables and outbuildings was acceptable to the local planning authority, but the insensitive and impractical submitted plans for the division of the hall were not. Car parking was proposed for the formal garden enclosed by Grade II* walls and gates screen, and the west façade. Unhappy implications were the subdivision of ownership, and lack of arrangements for maintenance of the grounds and Grade II* screen and walls. The local planning authority with English Heritage insisted on a second marketing exercise, to which DMU reluctantly Left:The west front of Scraptoft Hall Right:The view from the west front to the screen
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