Heritage Open Day – Heaton Hall, Manchester

Each year, some letter seen places around the UK throw their doors open as part of the Heritage Weekend(s) and it is an event that I attend each and every year.

This site in particular has not been open as part of this event for some years and when I was told it was included I had to pay it a visit.

I had been previously when it was last open, however at that time, it was a very limited set of rooms and it was by guided tour only, so I was expecting similar this time around. However, to my surprise, there was a lot more accessible this time around and it was free-roam which meant spending a good two hours enjoying all that was on offer.

A bit of history about the hall is as follows;-

Heaton Hall had been owned by the Holland family since the Middle Ages. In 1684, when Sir John Egerton, 3rd Baronet of Wilton, married Elizabeth Holland, the hall came to the Egerton family.[17] In 1772, Sir Thomas Egerton, 7th Baronet (later the 1st Earl of Wilton), commissioned the fashionable architect James Wyatt to design a new home for his young family. Although Wyatt had already established a reputation for himself as an innovative architect, he was only 26 years old and Heaton Hall was his first country house commission.[18] Wyatt’s neo-classical masterpiece was built in phases and was mostly completed by 1789.

The hall has been a Grade I Listed Building since 1952[15] and has been called “the finest house of its period in Lancashire”.[19] It is built of sandstone and stuccoed brick, in a traditional Palladian design with the entrance on the north side and the facade on the south. The landscaping was designed to make the most of the uninterrupted views of the rolling hills across to the Pennines. A feature of this was the ha-ha, used to keep the grazing animals, so important to the landscaping, away from the formal lawns, with a barrier that was all-but invisible from the house.

The state rooms include the Library, the Music Room, Dining Room and upstairs, a rather rare Etruscan Room. The rooms of the hall were exquisitely finished by the finest artists and craftsmen of the period, with most of the furnishings and mahogany doors being made by Gillow’s of Lancashire. Most of the decorative paintings, the Pompeiian Cupola Room and the case for the 18th century chamber organ built by Samuel Green in 1790,[27] were the work of Italian artist, Biagio Rebecca. The organ fills one wall of the Music Room. The ornate plasterwork was created by the firm of Joseph Rose II of York.