Derby Mill Hill House: An architectural detective story

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Local historian Maxwell Craven concludes his examination of the history of Derby’s Mill Hill House and its architectural links to other grand houses.

Belsay Hall, Northumberland, said to have provided the inspiration for amateur Derby architect Richard Leaper when he designed Mill Hill House and The Leylands

The south front of Arlington Court with the service wing which was added later. The house is said to have been the inspiratin for Derby's Mill Hill House

THE only other house in Derby which resembles Mill Hill is The Leylands, off Broadway. The attribution of The Leylands to the architect of Mill Hill House seems inescapable on stylistic grounds alone and this, coupled with Glover's description of the house following immediately upon his notice of Richard Leaper's architectural attainments, goes a long way to identifying him as the architect of both.

The clinching element is that the client for The Leylands was Leaper’s nephew, Alderman William Leaper Newton.

The house was built between 1819 and 1824 and is architecturally much more successful than Mill Hill House, probably explaining why it got listed in the 1950s.

The external appearance of The Leylands, though, quite apart from its clear derivation from Mill Hill House, leads to consideration of Arlington Court, in north Devon.

The earliest image of Arlington seems at first glance to be an uncanny mirror image of The Leylands, with a shorter three bay east (entrance) front with projecting portico and a five bay return (south) elevation, in this instance rather longer and consequently better proportioned.

The proportions are otherwise very similar and the differences are in the detail and the house is of stone, not brick.

The house was designed in 1820 and completed in 1823 and the architect was Thomas Lee, of Barnstaple.

The client was Colonel John Palmer Chichester and the key to any connection between The Leylands and Arlington Court lies in the ties, kinship and acquaintanceship between the Chichesters and a group of Derbyshire families all with close links to the Leapers and Newtons.

These were reinforced in 1829 when Col Chichester’s fourth son, the Rev James Chichester married Mary Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Bateman of Wheathills, Mackworth.

Significantly, the younger Chichester was at Eton and University College, Oxford with two of his future brothers-in-law, both Derby men.

Richard Bateman’s link with Leaper is that he lived as tenant of Francis Noel Clarke Mundy, of Markeaton Hall, at Wheathills until 1806, when the house was rebuilt to Leaper’s designs as a retirement home for Mundy himself.

Furthermore, Mundy’s son Francis had married, on December 16, 1800, Sarah, sister of William Leaper Newton of The Leylands and Richard Leaper’s great niece.

Thus there were ties between the Chichesters, Batemans, Mundys and Leaper Newtons going back two decades when Arlington was commissioned.

The marriage between the young Chichester and Richard Bateman’s daughter was part of a well-established pattern, although in the event, it was but a short-lived alliance, as the bride died in childbirth less than a year later.

Her marble effigy, reclining on a daybed, by Sir Francis Chantry – himself by then well known in Derby and a man born to a tenant on the Newton’s Norton estate – remains a striking ornament in the north aisle of Derby Cathedral.

Mary Elizabeth Bateman’s future husband was appointed rector of Arlington in 1824, and work was immediately set in hand to provide a new rectory, built under the direction of another local man, John Hooper, of Barnstaple.

Nor does the building closely resemble the Court, but it does resemble the original design for The Firs, Burton Road, built at about the same time, less than half a mile from Mill Hill House.

This, too, can be attributed to Richard Leaper and, although Arlington Court and Rectory are by two different architects, there seems to be the common denominator of Leaper bringing them together.

The design of The Leylands, although rooted in the slightly cumbersome infelicities of Mill Hill House, is in fact a much reduced version of Belsay Castle, Northumberland, the astonishingly impressive attempt begun in 1807 by Sir Charles Monck to adapt “ancient Greek architecture to domestic purposes”.

Belsay is a spectacular 100ft square mansion of two substantial storeys: very square, very plain, very Greek revival.

Here you can see the inspiration for Leaper’s efforts in Derby, with Mill Hill House as the prototype and The Leylands as the perfected version.

But if Belsay was indeed the inspiration for Leaper, however, a connection needs to be made between that house or its builder – who acted entirely as his own architect – and Richard Leaper or his clients.

Curiously enough, there are two connections. When the builder of Belsay got married in 1804, the happy couple honeymooned in Athens where, for two years, Sir Charles “immersed himself in Hellenic architecture”.

During their stay, they were joined by Sir William Gell, a most dedicated Greek enthusiast.

Here the future Belsay Castle was clearly conceived, and a drawing by Gell for it survives among Monck’s drawings.

William Gell belonged to the Hopton Hall family and was born in 1777. He was at Derby School at the same time as Richard Leaper’s nephew, William, before going on to Cambridge.

After that he went to Greece to study and draw the remains of the ancient topography.

When he eventually deigned to return to his native land, he was a frequent visitor to both his brother at Hopton and to Derby up to 1820 when he went to live in Italy, dying there in 1836.

Gell was closely related by marriage to F N C Mundy, who, as we have seen, let his seat at Wheathills, Mackworth, to James Chichester’s father-in-law Richard Bateman and later commissioned Richard Leaper to completely rebuild it.

The other connection is that Edward Swinburne, of Capheaton, a friend and neighbour of Sir Charles and Lady Monck, was a cousin of Thomas Swinburne of Mill Hill House, which furnishes a second line of contact between Belsay and Richard Leaper.

On the whole, it rather looks as if Sir William Gell told Richard Leaper about Belsay and the ideas he and Sir Charles had worked up during their Greek idyll and perhaps did him some sketches.

The result would seem to have been Mill Hill House.

I believe that, before going on to build The Leylands, Leaper actually had the opportunity of seeing Belsay for himself.

Thus, his second attempt at emulating it was much more successful and assured.

Furthermore, Arlington Court and The Leylands were clearly the direct result of this and the social inter-action between their owners.

But either way, the fact that one can trace all three houses back to the design of Belsay Castle and that all three were connected in some way to Richard Leaper, the amateur Derby architect, rather suggests that the real significance of Mill Hill House has been missed.

Which is rather a pity, because it is now about to vanish forever.

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