Chaseley Field

Chaseley Field is a detached villa built between 1848 and 1851 for Joseph John Armitage, a textile manufacturer and son of Sir Elkanah Armitage, an important Manchester merchant and politician. The family was involved in textile manufacture and owned factories in Salford. The building has undergone later nineteenth-century internal remodelling and early to mid-twentieth-century additions, and is now used as offices.

The house is constructed of rubble sandstone laid in shallow courses with ashlar dressings. It features coped gables, elaborate round chimney stacks, crested clay ridges, and a Welsh slate roof covering incorporating decorative bands of beaver-tailed slates of contrasting colour.

The plan is irregular but near-rectangular around a central stair hall, with the principal entrance to the south front. The building rises to two storeys and attics above extensive cellars. The asymmetrical entrance elevation to the south features an advanced narrow gable defined by shallow buttresses. A shallow projecting entrance gablet with pointed segmental arch gives access to an open entrance vestibule in ashlar masonry. The doorway has a moulded four-centre arch with flanking cusped lights beneath a stepped hood mould with label stops. The six-panel door has tall upper panels glazed and lower panels decorated with cusped arches. To the right of the entrance bay stands a taller gable with a full-height canted bay window below a steep lean-to roof. To the left is an almost full-height three-light mullioned window with shallow lintel set below a relieving arch. Upper floor two-light windows rest upon a moulded string course. All window openings contain sash frames without horns or glazing bars.

The west elevation is detailed in similar style. The south-west corner has a canted bay window set below a pierced ashlar parapet. Above this, against the gable face at first floor level, sits a canted bay, and to its left a stair window of three flat-headed cusped lights. The pierced parapet links the west gable of the south front with a mid-range gable, which incorporates a shallow full-height bay window in ashlar masonry with three lights at the lower part and two lights at upper level. Further left, a deep tower-like ashlar canted full-height bay has a pyramidal roof incorporating three pitched-roofed dormer windows with sash frames. The remaining elevations are more plainly detailed, with the north elevation incorporating a twentieth-century brick extension.

The interior is characterised by high-quality furnishings and fixtures throughout. The entrance inner vestibule has an encaustic tiled floor, and similar tiles extend throughout the principal ground and first-floor rooms. The original plan form has suffered little alteration and develops from the principal stair hall into three principal areas. The main stair is an elaborate open-well design with panelled newel posts supporting moulded finials, moulded handrails, and cusped lozenge-shaped open panels between the balusters. Wainscot panelling lines the interior and below the staircase. The stair lantern repeats the lozenge motif below diminutive scissor-braced trusses which support the glazed roof. Principal rooms retain heavy panelled hardwood doors within moulded architraves and moulded cornices. The elaborate hearth surrounds include that to the stair hall. Two ground-floor rooms retain elaborate overmantels, that in the south-west corner extending from floor to ceiling with a canopied head incorporating painted ceramic discs. Similar discs form frieze decoration around this room. The room to the north of the stair incorporates built-in display furniture.

Upon John Armitage's death in 1899, the house was given for use as a school and became Pendleton High School for Girls. It later passed into local authority ownership. The building represents a well-preserved and little-altered mid-nineteenth-century villa whose special architectural interest is particularly evident in an interior of exceptional quality, which distinguishes it from many of its numerous surviving contemporaries.