Local historian Maxwell Craven concludes his detailed look at the inner districts of Derby with Wilmorton.

WILMORTON is a remarkably compact residential district which was once part of the manor, and later village, of Osmaston. The ancient church of St James was, until 1867, a chapel-of-ease of the Derby church of St Peter, making the village part of the larger parish. It also marked, what in medieval times would have been the centre of the village.

The manor was originally held, on the eve of the Norman Conquest, by a man called Osmund, the significance of which fact is rather hard to discern. On the one hand, he was lord of a place which translates as “the settlement of Osmund” – “Osmundestune” in the Domesday Book – which might lead you to suppose that it was named after him. And, indeed, so it might, as we have no earlier reference to the place.

Unfortunately, the majority of similar names go back a couple of centuries before the 11th century at least, so it is actually fairly unlikely. Nevertheless, in noble Saxon families it was the custom to bestow names from generation to generation beginning with the same initial letter.

This could lead to frequent repetitions of the more popular names down the generations in one family. Thus the Osmund of 1066 could easily have been an actual descendant of the tribal leader whose name became attached to the settlement a few centuries earlier.

Against all this is the fact that Osmund was a fairly popular name at the time, made more so by the saint of that name, the one time Bishop of Salisbury who died in 1099. For my part, I like to think of Osmund as the descendant of the eponymous founder of the village.

A family called de Osmaston, who might conceivably have been Osmund’s descendants, held the estate until they were wiped out by the Black Death, a cataclysm that probably also saw the creation of something that bestowed the name on one of the later settlement of Wilmorton’s most prominent streets: Deadman’s Lane.

It is thought that the lane could have led to a pit in which the Derby plague victims were buried, outside the town’s boundary.

The Osmaston estate later passed through the Folchers and the Bradshaws until it was bought in the early 17th century by a younger branch of the Wilmots of Chaddesden, a Derby family which enriched itself in trade.

Their first house was a stone built three gabled residence rather like Duffield Hall, on the north side of Ascot Drive, probably added to an existing, older house, for tax was paid on a considerable 20 hearths in 1670.

It did not, however, remain like this for long. The earlier wing was replaced by a spanking new house of considerable size built by Robert Wilmot, recently elected as MP for Derby and using the profits of his father’s successful career as a top-flight lawyer.

The architect was almost certainly Sir William Wilson, a Sutton Coldfield stone carver who managed to bag an upper class bride and got himself knighted to keep up appearances.

He was not that gifted as an architect, although he was undoubtedly a good carver, and the house he produced was large, not overly well proportioned and as dull a piece of provincial baroque as you are likely to encounter. Nevertheless, it had presence allied to a fine interior.

The hall, therefore, was nothing if not magnificent and was added to in the mid-18th century, the work including a pair of Robert Bakewell gates (long lost).

Later, the park was re-landscaped by Derby’s talented follower of Capability Brown, William Emes, from 1789 at the behest of Sir Robert Wilmot.

The estate was 3,700 acres, including the site of the village, re-located to Osmaston Road (except the church) so as not to spoil the landscaping; hence its eventual disappearance.

The family left in 1814 when the 3rd baronet inherited the Catton Hall estate and moved there, away from the burgeoning industry of Derby, and took the surname and arms of Wilmot-Horton.

The house and 37 acres of park were promptly let. The tenant was the descendant of a Derby soap boiler called Sam Fox, close kin by marriage to the Strutts and the Darwins, and pillars of the Whig elite.

It was they who made the parkland available for the Royal Show in 1843 and 1881, but the Fox family had left by the latter date and the hall returned to the Wilmot-Hortons, mainly because of the 24-hour long clanking, hammering, roaring, heat and smoke of the foundries that had sprung up along Cotton Lane and Osmaston Road, Eastwood & Swingler being the worst culprit.

The Rev Sir George Wilmot-Horton sold land at the estate’s fringes for development. This included the hall and the northern segment of parkland to the Midland Railway in 1886, who expanded their facilities, laying tracks almost up to the front door and used the building as offices and storage.

Another portion, a mere slither, sandwiched between London Road and the Derby Canal, lying south of Deadman’s Lane, which was almost on the ancient borough boundary had been sold some eight years earlier to a developer to build houses, mainly for Midland Railway workers.

In 1887, this densely built up new district was officially given the name Wilmorton, created by cleverly compounding the former landowners’ surname. The name was immediately adopted by the GPO in order to distinguish it from other parts of Osmaston, where further land sales were creating Newtown (Crewton) and so on, and it stuck, soon obtaining official status.

The streets were laid out and built up swiftly, mostly with terraced houses to let. When the family of 11-year-old future alderman and local MP Will Raynes moved into 9 Archer Street, in 1883, it must have been almost straight from the builder.

From Dickinson and Taylor Streets, which seem to have formed the axes of the layout of the district, the other streets run north to south or east to west off or across them.

These axes were in existence by 1879, as were Selbourne and Beverley Streets; Clumber Terrace was added with a single row of cottages facing the canal slightly later.

Most of the streets seem to have been named after obscure local people, either connected with the development, like Richard Sutton Clifford, a Full Street solicitor who gave us Clifford Street, or people serving on the Alvaston Local Board, the organ of local government which took over the administration of the area as it was going up.

A School Board followed, quickly erecting the primary schools on London Road, Wilmorton, and Brighton Road, Crewton.

Three streets were named after three of the “big five” public schools: Eton, Harrow and Rugby. Presumably Winchester and Charterhouse were held in reserve for further expansion, which never happened!

In 1901, Derby County Borough Council obtained an Act of Parliament extending its boundaries, to include both Wilmorton, Crewton and parts of Alvaston and Boulton.

This meant that some streets with names already in use in other parts of Derby – two in Wilmorton and five in Crewton – had to be re-named.

Thus Henry and Warner Streets duplicated streets in Firs Estate and Strutt’s Park, so they were re-named, Gloster and Warwick Streets respectively.

Quite who or what Gloster Street was named after defeats me.

Warner Street had been named after a not particularly prominent local businessman but was re-named either after the town in Warwickshire or, more likely, bearing in mind the railway company’s connections with the area, after John Alfred Warwick, long the innovative signal and telegraph manager of the Midland Railway.

He was also the early collaborator and long-standing friend of Derby photographic pioneer Richard Keene.

Since the canal was opened in 1796, the Navigation Inn had been in business at the southern end of the enclave.

With the coming of Wilmorton, however, business boomed and it was re-built, to designs of Pountain’s in-house architect James Wright in 1895, to be joined by another even more splendid inn, the Portland Hotel, on the Deadman’s Lane-London Road corner within a decade.

The sudden increase in population led to the establishment of the Board School in 1892 which, miraculously, is still there, although due for closure.

The other consequence of the huge rise in population both at Wilmorton and Crewton was the swamping of the tiny, ancient and fragile parish church of St James, standing near the hall. It simply couldn’t cope.

Fortunately, the incumbent, the Rev Lancelot Currey, was one of the numerous and talented sons of Benjamin Scott Currey, the Duke of Devonshire’s local solicitor.

Their London cousins ran the Duke’s national legal matters and another cousin was a second generation land agent at Lismore, the Duke’s Irish residence. Hence, the Curreys were extremely well off.

Thus it was that Rev Currey took it upon himself to build, mainly out of his own resources, a completely new church, tactfully dedicated to St Osmund himself, immediately north of the canal where it was crossed by London Road.

He chose as his architect his brother, Percy, the most talented arts-and-crafts architect in the region. Percy created a lofty, dignified church and built a vicarage and almshouses complex round it just on the edge of Wilmorton where it is separated by the canal from Crewton, and at the time had the hall’s parkland to its west and north. Now listed, the church prospered and survived.

In contrast, the old church, sorry to say, gradually mouldered away, being finally demolished not so long after the war, when the hall’s remaining grounds were being turned into a part-residential/part-industrial estate (in the event, the residential element was quietly omitted), the vicarage limping on, latterly abandoned, into the mid-1980s when it, too, was needlessly destroyed.

The district was later graced by one or two first-rate LMS buildings, notably the rather Scandinavian looking neo-classical Railway School of Transport and the moderne-style laboratories of 1935 by H J Connal near the town centre.

The former is a building of national importance currently under serious threat of being gutted and surrounded by a huge number of small houses.

The gutting of the Railway School of Transport – important for being the first of its kind in Europe – would be a huge loss.

The building was designed and built in 1937-38 to train (pun intended!) employees of the world’s – and notably the Empire’s railways – and was once famous for its model electric railway used to demonstrate signalling techniques.

Chiefly its inside is important for its ingenious use of space, sumptuous art deco interiors and detailing, along with the three murals of railway subjects, two executed by Norman Wilkinson. Another distinguished artist, the sculptor Denis Dunlop, designed the exterior bas-relief panels.

The gutting of this magnificent building and the encroachment on it or on St Osmund’s by too many gimcrack modern houses should be resisted at all costs.

By the river, meanwhile, all long remained rural. The only intrusion came in 1933 when the mechanical barrier to control the backing up of the Derwent from the Trent was inaugurated as a consequence of the 1932 floods.

It is still there, but its surroundings were disfigured post-war by the corporation tip.

This, later, in the 1960s, was reclaimed as the site of the Wilmorton FE College but again, change is now in the air: the site is to be vacated and covered with homes.

Most recently, Pride Park has developed on the east side of the former canal and its main artery, Pride Parkway, opened in 2001, has swallowed up Harrow and Rugby Streets and has almost cut Wilmorton in half.

Yet, its essential 1880s’ charm remains and the area is blessed with a surprising number of good or charming buildings, apart from the simple brick dwelling houses: St Osmund’s complex, the school, the two very different but century-old pubs, the chapel (currently unused), the stunning Railway School of Transport and the laboratories (which could do with a clean and refurbishment).

Not many Derby districts have so much going for them. The trick over the next few years is to hang on to them and adapt them, where necessary, to modern requirements.

And what of the hall, finally sold by the LMS to Derby Corporation in 1938?

Knocked down the same year – needless to say!

• Area is blessed with charming buildings

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