An American Evolution

Over the past half century, the care of an American university has returned one of the landmark buildings of early Victorian England to life and splendour. John Goodall reports

- John Goodall

IT’S not quite Harlaxton Manor but we think you’ll like it’, says a large advertisement for the passenger lounge at Grantham station. The advertisement is testimony both to local awareness of this vast house and the splendour that it projects even from afar. Indeed, you don’t have to travel very far down the manor’s mile-long drive to wonder whether there really could be anything quite comparable. The impression increases as the visitor progresses around the gigantic interiors, which combine the forms of Tudor and Jacobean architecture with Baroque bravura.

Harlaxton Manor was the creation of one Gregory Gregory, an elusive figure educated at Rugby School and Christ Church, Oxford. From 1809, he served in the local militia and, in 1814, he succeeded to his father’s estate at Rempstone, Nottinghamshire. To this inheritance, he added his uncle’s property—including Harlaxton—in 1822, with a seat at Hungerton Hall. Despite owning nearly 6,000 acres of land, most of his wealth in fact derived from coal-mining and the industrial development of Lenton on the outskirts of Nottingham.

Many years later, in conversation with J. C. Loudon—who published a detailed account of a visit to Harlaxton on May 20, 1840, in The Gardener’s Magazine— Gregory claimed to have settled on building a house in the Jacobean style at the time of his uncle’s death in 1822. He also said that, because there were ‘few or no books on the subject, he examined personally most of the houses in Britain in that style’. Loudon goes on to list 19 buildings that Gregory travelled to see—from Bramshill to Hardwick and Longleat to Temple Newsam, as well as many smaller properties and university buildings.