THORPE HALL is set romantically on an impressive sweep of the River Yare, little more than a mile from Norwich station. Lovingly rescued from extreme decay, it combines the beauty of mellow Tudor brick, which changes colour through the day, with the local flint that gives character to so many Norfolk buildings.

Two public inquiries were fought to prevent demolition. I wrote in 1981 from SAVE Britain’s Heritage saying that consent to demolish should not be given until the house had been offered freehold on the market “to see if any private individual might be interested in restoring this very fine house”. It seemed a vain hope, given the appalling vandalism, but a saviour appeared in the shape of Henry Burke, a Norwich businessman with a passion for the arts, whose mother’s family were furriers. He bought the house for £1 and commissioned the architect Anthony Rossi to draw up plans for repair.

The exterior had been covered in a hard modern render. When this was removed, brick and flint proved to have a wonderful patina, giving the house an extraordinary mellow beauty and charm. The interior takes a matching warmth from the survival of Tudor timber-framed partitions and ceilings, with the large mullion windows ensuring that the main rooms are remarkably light.

In the Middle Ages Thorpe Hall was a summer palace of the Bishop of Norwich. Later, when the Catholics were persecuted, Thorpe’s riverside position was ideal for smuggling in priests by night, and there is a plausible priest hole at the top of the stairs.

In 1838 the hall was owned by Thomas Blakiston, a naval commander, who carried out a Victorian remodelling. Thorpe then passed by marriage to Major Frank Astley Cubitt, who lived to his nineties resolutely refusing to modernise the hall. When his son inherited in 1929 it was without bathrooms or electricity and so dilapidated that he had to sell to an unscrupulous antique dealer, who removed at least one carved stone fireplace before selling on to a boat-builder, who promptly demolished the chapel to make room for an engine repair shop.

During wartime requisitioning Thorpe received a direct hit from an incendiary bomb. Worse was to come as a boat-letting firm in the Sixties turned the lawns into a car park and felled a magnificent cedar. By the Seventies vandals had set to work smashing not only the glass of the windows but the distinctive mullions. The dining-room panelling and the stone fireplaces were stolen by dealers.

Rossi’s restoration of the large 1590 mullions has given back to Thorpe its touch of grandeur. He redid them in concrete, though as they are rendered you would never know. “We were able to use the bricks elsewhere when they finally arrived,” he says. One problem was how to treat a huge gash in the end wall of the south gable. The historic buildings inspector wanted Rossi to put in mullion windows to match the others. He refused and eventually won his way, introducing a double-height bay in timber in a distinctly Arts and Crafts manner. His are also the dormers, unusually large and making the second-floor rooms a delight. After Burke’s death five years ago, his widow sold the house and it is now for sale again. Burke’s planting has matured well. He also built a garden terrace large enough for concerts, with the audience sitting on the lawn sloping down to the river. For the right buyer an idyllic life awaits.



Thorpe Hall is being sold via Jackson-Stops & Staff, 01603 612333, for £1.5 million

PASSNOTES

Houses of the later medieval period had open-beam ceilings with exposed joists supporting the floorboards above. When decorative plaster ceilings came into fashion in the mid-16th century “deep joists” were introduced with double tenons (or tongues) fixed into mortices (holes) cut in the beams. That created an even grid

of woodwork to which the ceiling could be attached, concealing both beams and joists. According to the carpentry historian Cecil Hewitt, the earliest example of that type of construction was at Middle Temple in London dating from the mid-16th century. By the end of the century double-tenon joists were in wide use. At Thorpe Hall the architect Anthony Rossi found textbook examples of those joists.

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