Green Lane Derby: From opulent villas to artisans' cottages

Maxwell Craven explores the intriguing area of Derby around Green Lane which used to be known as Green Hill.

GREEN Lane was the ancient route from Derby to Burton-on-Trent and remained so until the construction of Abbey Street in 1826.

It ran from Brookside, now Victoria Street which in the 17th and 18th centuries was a fashionable residential area, to Normanton Road, where it turns south-west.

In 1789, the Improvement Commissioners pitched Babington Lane through the grounds of St Peter’s (later Babington) House and Abbott’s Hill House to join Green Lane at this same spot.

A surviving artefact from this period is the Green Lane cast iron milepost, in the style of John Harrison’s Bridge Street foundry, set near the former Powers sports shop, close to the corner of Gower Street. It reads “Burton 11 miles”.

The whole area of rising ground through which Green Lane runs was once called Green Hill and, in the earlier part of the 19th century, much of the west side was owned by the Rev Roseingrave Macklin, first vicar of Christ Church.

The land to the east of Green Lane was mainly owned at this time by the Forman family of Abbott’s Hill House, a fine mansion erected in the grounds of Tudor Babington House by Dr Simon Degge and demolished in 1926 to build Hunters.

Robert Forman belonged to a younger branch of the Formans of Chellaston and was a rich maltster, having built, before 1819, an extraordinary row of cottages along the east side of Babington Lane with a malting floor above them.

The story of how the entire hillside came to be built up is an intriguing one.

The buildings which appeared there as a result are still mainly intact and form an extremely interesting late Regency and early Victorian suburban development, including houses of all types from opulent villas to artisans’ cottages.

As a result, and prompted by the sudden threat of large-scale demolition in the area as a result of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s decision to include urban gardens as “brown-field sites” in 2000, not to mention the city council’s enthusiastic application of this principle, Derby Civic Society last year decided to research the entire area and submit an application to have it designated as a Conservation Area.

In fact, the area, which the society decided to expand to include that part of St Peter’s Street where East Street and St Peter’s Churchyard cross, is full of listed buildings.

No less than four of the 15 being listed Grade II*.

For instance, in Green Lane itself, the intersection of Degge Street, once the drive to Abbott’s Hill House, and Wilson Street has a very striking group of listed buildings, dominated by the former Art College.

This Grade II* listed building was put up in 1876-77 and enlarged in 1896 by Gloucester architect F W Waller, aided by his pupil, Thomas Simmonds, the new college’s principal, who was a great enthusiast for the Arts-and-Crafts movement.

Opposite are the pointed gables of Stuart Terrace (110-112 Green Lane and 73 Wilson Street) built by Nottingham architect Thomas Chambers Hine in 1851-52 for Alderman Henry Darby who, like Robert Forman, was a future mayor of the town.

These three houses are particularly splendid and are listed Grade II. Immediately behind them, in Wilson Street, lies No. 72, probably by the same architect and unlisted.

Attached to their south end is Green Hill Terrace, five exceptionally fine stuccoed late Regency villas of c1835, also listed Grade II.

On the other Green Lane-Wilson Street corner is the 1862 villa impressively rebuilt by Derby architects Browning and Hayes in 1931-32 to form the Beaconsfield Conservative Club.

On the lower Degge Street corner stands the well-proportioned No. 93, designed by Ticknall-born architect George Henry Sheffield and built in 1859 by Edward du Sautoy and Co for one of Alderman Forman’s younger sons.

This, regrettably, is to be demolished to allow for the construction, in a poor and intrusive design, of a hostel for the homeless.

Diagonally across from No. 93, on the Macklin Street corner, is the impressive Grade II listed Hippodrome Theatre designed by specialist architects Marshall and Tweedy and built in 1913-14.

The interior of this remarkably elegant building in still largely intact, right down to the stage apparatuses, hence its successful spot-listing a decade ago.

But Green Lane also has much else of interest. In paintings done even 80 years or so ago, it seems to retain a delightfully country ambience; its suburban bloom was not then sacrificed to pollution and traffic.

Yet the street represents a clear progression of continuous growth from north to south covering the early 18th-century listed cottages at the bottom, through earlier 18th-century houses, to late 18th-century, Regency and late Regency dwellings.

All have been in-filled with buildings of various dates.

Some of these, like the theatre, replaced earlier structures.

In this case, elegant Green Hill House, once a private lunatic asylum, and the half-timbered shops on the south-east curve of Green Lane and St Peter’s Churchyard by John Wills the younger have replaced Dr Sims’ house which was another magnificent Regency villa.

John Wills’ father of the same name was a notable designer of Wesleyan chapels which is the cue to remind readers that there are no less than four in the Green Lane area, all of interest.

He rebuilt, in 1893, the Marrowbones chapel, designed originally by John Gadsby in 1816 for the Independents. It was so called because it was said to have been financed by three local butchers.

Failing to attract a sufficient congregation, it was sold to Wesleyan Methodists in 1821, being rebuilt by them in 1868-71 by Giles and Brookhouse.

It finally closed in 1989 and at first was a shop selling Rams merchandise.

In Green Lane itself, there are no less than three other chapels, all built within a decade. The former Presbyterian Greenhill chapel, by J Tait of Leicester, was built in 1868 and converted into a pub in 1975-79 at the cost of having the top of its spire removed and the interior stripped. It now appears to be derelict.

Then there is the former Primitive Methodist chapel of 1878, also by Giles and Brookhouse, and a replica of their earlier (1871) chapel in Kedleston Street (long demolished).

Unfortunately, the ground floor was rather crudely converted to retail use and the tower caps reduced in 1978.

Beyond the Art College, too, there is the Trinity Baptist chapel designed by Lawrence Bright, of Nottingham, in 1877, to re-house the congregation of the exceptionally pretty Particular Baptist chapel in Agard Street, demolished to make way for the Great Northern Railway extension.

It is the only one still in use.

There was also a Baptist schoolroom, now a house, in Forester Street and, next door, a spiritualist chapel, long ago converted from a private house.

Even the streets leading off Green Lane are of interest.

Macklin Street was an ancient thoroughfare called Cross Lanes.

It was re-pitched in 1842-43 as a 36ft wide macadamised road, although the impressive terrace of 17 houses called Victoria Terrace had been completed five years before, along with four late Regency houses between the end of the terrace and Green Lane.

The north side of the street was, however, always rather nondescript, with the slums of Summer Hill Yard and the miniscule cottages of Becket Well Lane, gathered round the famous pyramidal well head of 1640.

These were all swept away in 1962 to make way for the awful Duckworth Square, itself also now gone.

Like Macklin Street, Wilson Street was named after the Rev Macklin’s family and was pitched higher up in 1853-54.

Here the impressive villas of the more well-to-do had the very best view, while their slightly less fortunate brethren resided in Crompton Street in short terraces of cottages.

Crompton Street, named after local banker and bigwig John Bell Crompton, was pitched at the same time as Wilson Street.

In both, the houses largely survive, although in many cases with unsympathetic alterations.

In some ways, Forester Street, named after Dr Richard Forester, a Mundy in-law and local Whig radical philanthropist, was the most interesting.

When pitched in about 1840, it was divided by the northern tip of Little City.

Only the eastern section will survive the extension of the Inner Ring Road.

Yet, this contains the unexpectedly handsome south facing Forester Terrace of eight artisans’ cottages, stuccoed and pedimented, along with Hill Brow, a surviving court of four handsome cottages, all well cared for.

Due to the course chosen in the early 1960s for the Inner Ring Road, Gerard Street, also named after an element of Rev Macklin’s family, could not be included in the Civic Society’s proposals, despite the elegant gothick villa surviving near the bottom of Wilson Street, narrowly saved from destruction in 1989, and the delightful Oriel Terrace, a row of 12 cottage houses of 1838, some still largely intact.

Too much hereabouts has also been lost, including the Lifeboat, Derby’s smallest inn, and some other elegant late Regency housing.

Nevertheless, it is a fascinating area, but one which, if not given the protection of conservation area status, is likely to fall prey to speculative housing developments instead of renovation schemes aimed at using existing properties.