House gives insight into how we lived

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Pickford’s House Museum was opened in September 1988 after a huge effort by the staff and Friends of Derby Museums. Last month’s announcement that Derby City Council intends to close it from All Fools’ Day, except to pre-booked parties – which accounted for only about one eighth of the total visitors last year – prompted Maxwell Craven, who was involved in the setting up of the museum, to re-tell the story of this historically significant building.

THE site where Pickford’s House stands was part of the ancient piece of corporation land called Nuns’ Green that was once part of the Convent of St Mary de Pratis and was given to the borough by Queen Mary in 1555.

The corporation’s need to raise money led, in 1768, to the passing of an Act of Parliament giving the borough the right to sell a strip of land fronting the street then also called Nuns’ Green – Friar Gate to you and me – 45 yards front to back.

Each plot was 50 feet wide and a group of trustees, headed by banker Alderman John Heath, was set up to administer the task. The plots were sold by tender the same year, most fetching around £150.

The Derby architect, Joseph Pickford, bought at least five plots. He paid £153/8s/6d each for two other plots in September 1768, so we may assume that the sum paid for the future site of his house was similar, although the contract is missing.

Most Derbeians, until the 1960s, tended to be told that 41 Friar Gate – Pickford’s – was designed “by Robert Adam en route for Kedleston” which is a reasonable statement bearing in mind that Pickford worked under Adam at Kedleston.

It was a young Edward Saunders – now a senior architect but in the late 1940s articled to T H Thorpe & Partners in the house – who untangled the story.

He realised that the house was not by Adam and, by dint of lengthy research, eventually uncovered the true story: that it had been built by an architect of whom nobody had then heard, Joseph Pickford.

This made it really very important because few houses designed by Georgian builder/architects for their own use survive. This is why, in the re-evaluation of Derby’s Statutory List in 1976-77, the house was re-listed Grade I.

Mr Saunders went on to discover more about the architect for, from the exquisite proportions of the building and assured handling of the late Palladian style, he judged him to have been a man of no mean talent. The result was Joseph Pickford, A Georgian Architect published in 1993.

The deeds of purchase of the land at Nun’s Green imposed a number of requirements. Houses had to be put up on the plots within five years, were to be of three storeys and have proper down pipes rather than spouts. A “sough” (drain) was to be dug at the north end of the plot and connected up to the houses.

Also, the houses were to be kept in good repair in perpetuity – something which the current council, as the successor of the trustees, should bear in mind – and no purchaser was allowed to build a silk mill or any other type of factory.

All these conditions, in the event, got broken at one time or another.

Pickford designed his house to impress, for it was not only to be a family home but also his office. The facade had to impress potential clients, which is why it is a riot of motifs first introduced into the architectural canon by the Italian renaissance architect Andrea Palladio – hence the style we call Palladian – but carried off with such aplomb as not in any way to jar.

Although the house is not as deep as one might expect, Pickford used the fall of the ground from the street towards the Markeaton Brook 150 yards away to add an extra storey at the back, supporting his grandest rooms on an arched loggia from which one could reach the garden.

Inside, the hall is richly decorated with ornamental plasterwork including representations of the Nine Muses around the frieze and what appears to be a cameo portrait of the man himself in the centre point of the ceiling, all without doubt executed by his plasterer, Abraham Denstone the younger.

This all gives a rather rococo air, although the pilastered door-case is strictly in the coming neo-classical style of Robert Adam, as is the fine tripartite stone pedimented entrance in Roman Doric with its quasi-freemasonic display of architectural implements.

Off this hall are three main rooms. The present breakfast room to the east, fairly plain and slightly rebuilt in the regency period by the architect’s son, a parson, was the original office, for when renovating it, we discovered the marks, within the niches flanking the fireplace, of close-set shelving for the storage of plans and drawings.

This room was later adapted into the Rev Pickford’s parlour.

Opposite was the original family parlour, again very plain but probably both rooms had bravura chimneypieces in order to impress clients were they to be invited into Pickford’s inner sanctum or to glimpse the parlour through its open door, as we do today.

Unfortunately, Pickford’s son removed the original fireplace in the breakfast room and installed a rather dull Regency affair, albeit in Sicilian marble.

A later owner must have removed the parlour one, too, but luckily I was able to persuade the man who bought and renovated Mundy House in the Wardwick to give us a fine neo-classical one from there.

Most of Pickford’s clients would have been received in the house’s finest room, the saloon, entered via a door opposite the entrance and the largest such room in the street. It was created by placing the staircase – built in very spartan manner with no ornamentation and thus hidden from sight of anyone in the hall – well off the centre-line position usual in such houses.

This is a superbly proportioned space. It is embellished with a superb modillion frieze and set off by one of a small handful of beautiful neo-classical Blue John inlaid fireplaces, designed by Pickford, carved by his associate, the former Kedleston sculptor George Moneypenny, and inlaid by the celebrated spar turner Richard Brown, then operating out of the Old Shop at the Silk Mill.

Here the potential clients must have been suitably impressed and gladly, no doubt, signed up to employ Pickford in designing their houses, public buildings, factories or even churches.

All this ran Pickford short of money, so the rest of the house was finished with the minimum of embellishment.

No doubt Pickford anticipated improving it when he became rich enough to spare the money and time but, of course, although his career was successful, it was cruelly cut short by his sudden death in July 1782, aged only 48.

Wherever you go, though, you can see him at work. When you reach the top of the staircase on the first floor landing, for instance, you have to step up when entering the bedrooms, all originally en suite with dressing rooms. This is because of the extra height demanded by the grand rooms below.

When Pickford died, his widow carried on living there until her own death in 1812, when the property came to his surviving son, an alumnus of Oriel College, Oxford and perpetual curate of Little Eaton and Quarndon. He divided the house, keeping the breakfast room as his parlour, the room behind, off the service corridor, and he rebuilt the rear extension as his other accommodation.

The original parlour, saloon, entrance hall, main staircase and lower ground floor were let as a separate residence.

One problem we had in interpreting the house and trying to assess what exactly it had originally been like was that these alterations had obliterated much of the evidence. Where, for instance, had been the original kitchen? Where was the builder’s yard where Pickford’s prefabricated doorcases, chimneypieces, balustrades, architraves and so on were kept and carved?

Were the staff billeted on the second floor or in the much rebuilt and once rambling rear extension?

The kitchen mystery we never fully resolved. One school of thought places it in the cellar, which I consider too low in height and poorly ventilated. I have always plumped for a smaller one, roughly where the present one is, but there are difficulties with that, too.

The builder’s yard was clearly not out the back for I discovered that, originally, there was a sort of triumphal arch from the side (carriage) entrance through the rear extension and into a carriage house. Also, an excavation we conducted revealed the footings of a round garden temple-like structure near the west end of the car park.

This seemed to me to echo that before which Joseph Wright placed Pickford’s children whom he painted in the 1770s: no scope for a builder’s yard there, then.

Yet, we know that when Pickford died, Moneypenny conducted a two-day sale of the contents of the yard in Nuns’ Green so where was it?

Eventually, I found the solution in the deeds to 45 and 44 Friar Gate, both Pickford plots. He had craftily sold both on, reserving to himself a right of way between the two along with a plot behind No 45 – which was originally built as a silk mill, despite the stipulations of the deeds – and the right to design any building the purchasers wished to erect thereon.

Indeed, No 44 is typical Pickford, although No 45 was, in 1799, turned into a normal house by another hand so Pickford’s contribution is more difficult to discern.

So, the builder’s yard turned out to have been behind No 45 and the site remained largely unchanged until about 1991, with a row of four tiny cottages alongside, presumably built for the silk mill’s workforce rather than Pickford’s lads.

Unfortunately, in that year, planning permission was granted for their removal despite the fact that they were the only surviving artisans’ cottages anywhere by Joseph Pickford.

I believe that there were only three or four servants originally and that they lived on the second floor, where there were originally three bedrooms which also connected with the second staircase, along with a room the same size as the saloon on the ground floor. This was either another of Pickford’s working spaces or even a sort of servants’ hall. Today, it houses the excellent temporary exhibitions held regularly in the building.

After the alterations of 1812, Mrs Knightley occupied the main part of the house, then J Henry Smith and, from 1827, Miss Mary Meynell. This was about the time the street was numbered when the main house became No 41 and the Rev Joseph Pickford’s portion, No 40.

He, however, died in June 1844 unmarried and probably intestate, for the property went to his nearest male heir, William Pickford, of Greenwich, probably the grandson or even great-grandson of one of Pickford’s much older half-brothers.

William was clearly more interested in the house’s value than on uprooting to Derby to live and he took out a mortgage on the property with William Evans MP of Allestree Hall, a member of the Darley Abbey cotton-spinning dynasty.

Meanwhile, he had installed Philip Hammond, the first headmaster of the Diocesan School, on the corner of Friar Gate and Vernon Street, as his tenant at No 40, while Mary Meynell continued in the main house.

In the event, though, Pickford couldn’t keep up his mortgage payments and, in 1850, the house passed to Evans and, in 1856, was inherited by his son, Alderman Sir Thomas William Evans who, by 1864, was using it as his Derby town house. However, by 1874 he was MP for Derbyshire and in London for much of the time and the whole house, which Sir Thomas William had re-united, was let that year to solicitor William Allen, although within four years it was re-let to a pair of maiden ladies, the Misses Kilner and Pickering.

They were there when, in July 1879, the property was bought from Evans by Frederick Ward who had sold it on within four months to Cornish-born surgeon and celebrated Derbyshire cricketer, William Grafton Curgenven.

He lived in the house and converted part of what had been No 40 into consulting rooms, building a room on where the ramp now ascends to the public (side) entrance.

In 1908, he was succeeded by another consultant, John Acton Southern and he, in 1935, by his former partner Frederick William Schofield, along with his son James Barlow Schofield.

In about 1948/49 he left and the house was taken over by architect Thomas Harrison Thorpe and his partner George Larkin, whose articled clerk Edward Saunders eventually unravelled the key to the house’s origin.

Strangely, Dr Schofield’s consulting rooms, No 40 Friar Gate, ended up the property of Derbyshire County Council in 1974 and was demolished by them in 1977, the site being re-united with the house shortly afterwards.

In 1982, the architects moved across the street and the museum bought it, taking more than six years to renovate it and organise the displays.

Pickford’s House is one of a small number of medium sized town dwellings to be fully restored as a museum. It tells us much about the sort of life lived in town by members of the burgeoning middle class, but also survives as a very immediate monument to the architect who built it.

We must hope that the council have a change of heart and take steps to radically improve this excellent museum.

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