Havelock House

Havelock House

A house built in 1688 and refronted in the late 18th or early 19th century, situated on Mill Street in Gamlingay. The building is constructed of red brick laid in Flemish bond with tuck-pointed front wall and a tiled roof featuring end stacks, one of which on the south has been rebuilt. Gable end parapets sit on kneelers, now partly obscured at the south end by paired wood modillion eaves cornice that returns partly round the gable end.

The house comprises a main family range with a domestic wing at the rear and a contemporary but smaller range running parallel to the front range, which now contains a service staircase and has been extended. The building rises two storeys with an attic level and contains two dormers.

The facade is symmetrical, presenting a late 18th or early 19th-century composition of five windows containing twelve-pane recessed hung sashes. A brick plat band divides the storeys. The ground floor has four similar windows under gauged brick arches flanking a central doorway. The doorway itself is late 18th or early 19th-century work, featuring six raised and fielded beaded panels, a rectangular fanlight with glazing bars and original glazing. Above the doorway, reset within the plat band, is a cartouche of moulded brick with a scrolled border and mask at its upper centre, bearing the initials ANF.

The rear elevation retains original window openings, though the windows themselves are later insertions.

South of the house, adjoining it, stands a range of offices and a coach-house built circa 1840 in red brick with a slate roof. The range features a central carriageway with boarded doors and an office sash window with a single vertical glazing bar and accompanying door next to the house.

Interior

The house contains three plaster ceilings of 1688 attributed on stylistic grounds to Henry Doogood, the London plasterer who was working on the Old Library at Pembroke College, Cambridge and 5 Market Hill, Cambridge at approximately this period.

The ground floor room features a central rectangular panel with bolection moulding and corner roundels bearing foliate bosses, flanked by rectangular side panels. Concealed behind wall panelling on the north and east walls are six oval wall paintings depicting a church and spire, gallows, a man in a top hat, and flying birds.

The staircase is largely 19th-century work, though the attic flight retains twisted newels and balusters of the late 17th century, and some column-on-vase balusters suggest possible intermediate remodelling. The landing is approached through a screen with an elliptical arch and a central head mask with cartouches to the imposts bearing the date 1688. The ceiling has a square centre panel with bay leaf ornament and moulded cornice.

The first floor chamber contains the most elaborate ceiling. Its centrepiece depicts the God Cupid in clouds attended by flying birds, surrounded by an oval garland of fruit and flowers in high relief. An outer frieze of foliage includes animals—dogs, swine, and deer—and plasterers' or masonic emblems at either end. The four corners each contain a component digit of 1688 in a quadrant. A bolection-moulded fireplace surround is complemented by a plaster overmantel of matching quality and date. The overmantel features a square centre panel depicting a kneeling putto offering a basket of fruit and flowers with a landscape beyond.

The house was likely built and the plasterwork undertaken for Nicholas Apthorp, who in the late 17th century is known to have held substantial landholdings in Gamlingay.