Oakwood Hall

SE14SW BINGLEY LADY LANE SE111404 (west side)

2/100 Oakwood Hall 6.11.73 II

Large mill owner's house, now hotel. c1864 by George Knowles and William Wilcox (Bradford) internal decoration to designs of William Burges and stained glass by Morris & Co. to designs of Burne-Jones and possibly Morris himself for Thomas Garnett (a local cloth merchant); mid C20 extension by R. A. Singleton. Hammer-dressed stone, ashlar dressings, Welsh blue-slate roof. 2 storeys with attic. Gothic Revival style. L-shaped entrance front with 3 gables and 4 bays. All are multi-light mullioned- and-transomed windows except that to 1st floor of 1st bay which has a French-looking oriel. 2nd bay breaks forward and has doorway with Tudor arch and above, large stair-window. Over door is gabled Gothic gas-lamp, possibly to a design of Burges. 3rd bay has 4-light window to each floor and forms link to gabled 4th bay. Tall steeply- pitched coped gables. Stacks with diagonally-set flues to left and right. Left-hand return has 2 gables, one with 2-over-4 light stepped double-chamfered mullioned window in the local style. Stack of 3 diagonally-set flues to this range.

Interior: stair-hall has open-well staircase with Jacobean style barley-sugar balusters; carved newels, that to base surmounted by decorative gas-lamp. The stair is lit by a stained glass window of high quality. The lower zone of the window is decorated with flower patterns set in a diagonal grid of quarries. The upper 2 zones have a background of quarries with a floral motif. Against the quarries are 4 panels, 3 of female figures representing the Four Seasons (possibly by Morris) with St. George in the 3rd panel from a design by Burne-Jones made shortly before 1865. Set above are 4 medallions of Chaucerian heroines again designed by Burne-Jones: Dorigen, Griselda, Cresyde and Constance. This window is thought to contain some of the finest early domestic stained glass by Morris and Co. that has yet been discovered (N. Taylor and A. Symond). The only real survivor of the designs made by William Burges is the dining room fireplace executed by the sculptor Thomas Nicholls. It has a gabled overmantel and a castellated mantel-piece with incised crosses, flanked by tourelle brackets on fan tracery corbels. In the centre are the initials "TG" on a shield. Against the gable is a version of the Lincoln Imp set against a background of columbine leaves. Burges also designed furniture for oakwood which is the earliest of his comprehensive schemes of domestic design that is known (C. H. Read, quoted in Taylor and Symonds). Oakwood is of importance as it is the only domestic house, apart from Waltham Abbey, where the work of Burges and Morris can be seen side by side blending perfectly.

N. Taylor and A. Symonds, "Burges and Morris at Bingley: A Discovery", Architectural Review, July 1968. The original drawings of Burges for Oakwood are in the RIBA Drawings Collection.

Listing NGR: SE1112740398