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Girls and women ironing in the laundry of the Railway Servants Orphanage in 1913

Bulldozers move in to knock down the Railway Servants' Orphanage in Ashbourne Road, Derby

Derby's Railway Servants' Orphanage was a splendid example of architecture due to the fact that it was based within the structure of a classic Regency villa

Recent articles about St Christopher’s Home in Ashbourne Road, formerly the Railway Servants’ Orphanage, prompted historian Maxwell Craven to delve into the history of the institution and the various buildings it has occupied over the years, including a villa owned by a Frenchwoman with ‘revolutionary tendencies’.

For almost a century, the Railway Servants’ Orphanage, later St Christopher’s, was housed in Edward Fryer’s magnificent 1880s French chateau-style building, on Ashbourne Road.

Derby City Council unfortunately allowed this excellent building to be demolished in 1978, despite its listed Grade II status. What prompted my thoughts was the discovery of an engraving of the building which preceded it, a fine Regency villa to which the orphanage had added a substantial wing.

This reminded me that the institution had originally begun in yet another Regency building, William Jeffrey Etches’ house, off London Road. It was let to house the institution when it was first founded as a private enterprise in the 1860s. This villa was set in grounds which went right up to the Midland main line.

Set in the wall, close to the house, was an elaborate shrine to Guiseppe Garibaldi, the hero of Mrs Etches, who was described as “a Frenchwoman of revolutionary tendencies”.

Unfortunately, the grounds were eventually seen as the ideal place to build a new gasworks for Derby. So the Etches sold out and retired to the country, while the orphanage had to move.

The remaining parkland was sold to the Midland Railway to build carriages on and the house, rendered uninhabitable by the proximity of the gasworks, had to be demolished.

The orphanage was re-sited in 1875 to a villa situated between 173 and 174 Ashbourne Road. In those days, the road was numbered starting with No 1 at Goodall’s corner up to Markeaton Hall and then back down the other side to 199 at the junction with Uttoxeter New Road. Nowadays it is odds and evens.

The orphanage was re-founded as an independent charity with Midland Railway chief, Sir James Allport, as treasurer and chaired by John Bailey, who also lived in a Regency villa, the long-vanished Temple House on Burton Road.

The house itself had long been the residence of lawyer Thomas Handford Richardson, whose name recurs in the streets later built across what had once been his land. It was, however, constructed as Whitecross Fields House between 1819 and 1824 for Samuel Rowland. It was typical of the work of Derby builder-architect Joseph Cooper, whose Parkfields, Park Grove, still survives.

Its facade was set off by a coat of Brookhouse’s Roman Cement, made on the Morledge from Chellaston alabaster or gypsum, crushed up and mixed with lime and other substances. This was then grooved to look like cut stone blocks, or ashlar.

The front door was entered through a projecting Doric portico and there was a service wing off to the east side, lower and plainer.

The orphanage added a two-storey wing but it was higher than the original house, albeit in matching style with a stair window at the part nearest to the original house.

Even after the orphanage sold some of the land for building the New Zealand estate, it still had five acres of grounds. The land sale, a decade after the place was established, was to finance a new building.

My point is that there were once many delightful, well-proportioned, later Regency villas in Derby, of which few now survive – among them The Leylands, Litchurch Villa (the R-R club in Osmaston Road) and Parkfields.

Their rise was the result of the increasingly crowded town centre, where the more traditional town house was beginning to lose its appeal. The edges of the town combined the pleasures of the countryside with the convenient proximity of the town.

Yet the town itself was being rapidly improved and re-shaped by the Improvement Commissions, giving Derby grand new buildings like the General Infirmary, the prison in Vernon Street, the Royal Hotel, the 1828 Guildhall and others. This was backed by the prosperity bestowed by a new canal and a vastly improved roads infrastructure.

This great rebuilding also produced a number of fine local architects, like George Moneypenny Jnr, George Rawlinson, Joseph and William Mansfield Cooper, William Smith, Samuel Brown and the gifted amateurs, William Strutt, cotton billionaire, and Richard Leaper, banker, tanner, excise man and serial Mayor of Derby.

Not only them, but a number of London men of national renown came to Derby to build, like Matthew Habershon, who worked extensively for the Strutts.

This Regency architectural flowering made Derby a city renowned for its elegance, intellectual vigour and social life at the time.

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County:  Derbyshire

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