Thorne Hall, Ellison Street, Thorne

Thorne Hall, Ellison Street, Thorne

A large house of mid to late 18th-century date with early 19th-century alterations and later extensions, most recently used as local authority offices. The building is constructed of roughcast rendered brick with Welsh slate roofs.

The plan comprises a main house with four ground-floor reception rooms and a central entrance hall opening into a stair hall, flanked by pavilion wings. The left-hand pavilion contains a ballroom and the right-hand pavilion houses a service staircase. Bedrooms and dressing rooms occupy the first floor.

The house rises to three storeys with an attic. The west front elevation displays five bays beneath a triangular pediment, flanked by set-back pavilion wings of two storeys with a single bay each. The central section features rusticated quoins, moulded cornicing to the pediment, and an architraved oculus in the tympanum. The central doorway contains a panelled door and fanlight with radial glazing bars, set beneath a consoled cornice. Ground and first-floor windows are six-over-six pane sashes with projecting sills; second-floor windows are three-over-three pane sashes, some with missing glazing bars. The left pavilion wing has a plain Venetian window with sashes and glazing bars on the ground floor, with a tripartite window with sash windows and glazing bars above on the first floor. The right pavilion wing similarly has a Venetian window with a door inserted to its right, two inserted sash windows at mid-storey height, and a tripartite first-floor window. Both pavilion wings have cornices continued from the central part and hipped roofs. The central bays have lateral stacks and a flagpole to the centre ridge with a brick stack set back to its right; a later stack is built against the left return. Later two-storey extensions are attached to both pavilion wings.

The east rear elevation has a central round-arched doorway flanked by two-storey curved bays, each with three six-over-nine pane sash windows on the ground floor and three six-over-six pane sash windows on the first floor beneath corniced flat roofs. The second-floor windows and central pediment with oculus mirror the front elevation. The pavilion wings are similarly treated to the front but without inserted openings.

The entrance hall contains a Doric-columned screen opening into the stair hall, both featuring mutule cornices. Doorways opening off have slender architraves and fanlights with glazing bars. A cantilevered stone staircase rises beneath a roof lantern with plain moulded plaster panels to the side walls. The staircase features slender iron balusters decorated with plain circles and a ramped mahogany handrail. The open-well service staircase in the right pavilion wing has alternate barley sugar and turned wooden balusters, with simpler turned balusters to its uppermost flights, and a heavy moulded handrail which appears later in part.

The ballroom in the left pavilion wing is of principal interest. It features mahogany six-panel doors with moulded architraves, enriched moulded architraves to the windows, dado panelling, and a fine plaster ceiling in Rococo/Neo-classical style. The ceiling has an elongated octagonal centre panel containing delicate foliage scrolls within an oval entwined with vines, with further foliage scrolls between the centre panel and ceiling border, an enriched cornice, and plasterwork entablature band. The fireplace in the centre of the south wall has been removed and patched, confirming that the panel moulding above the dado is modern.

On the first floor, doors opening off the stair landing are fielded six-panel doors with moulded architraves. The main house contains several 18th or early 19th-century fireplaces, including an 18th-century fireplace in the front right-hand room with marble slips in an enriched eared architrave, pulvinated frieze and moulded mantelpiece, and a decorated timber fireplace in the rear room of the left pavilion wing.

The attic rooms have lime ash floors. A large basement contains brick-vaulted rooms with chamfered oak beams and joists supporting the floors above.

Late 19th or early 20th-century two-storey extensions to the pavilion wings and the two-storey and single-storey buildings arranged round the depot yard are not of special interest.