Headley Court And Attached Former Stables

Headley Court and attached Former Stables

Country house and attached stables, now an Officers' Mess, completed in 1899. Designed by Edward Warren for Walter Cunliffe (later 1st Baron Cunliffe and Governor of the Bank of England), it was built on the foundations of and incorporates some walls of earlier buildings. The house is in Jacobethan style, constructed in red brick with stone dressings.

The roofline features tiled roofs with Flemish gables, dormers, and tall brick chimney stacks, some with blind arcading and others diagonally set and grouped. The house is L-shaped in plan, comprising two storeys, attics, and cellars. Fenestration is irregular, predominantly comprising stone-cased transom and mullion windows with small panes.

The entrance facade has a projecting double-height portico with a triumphal arch stone case below a three-light window, flanked by pilasters and terminated with a shallow stone-coped pediment. To the right stands a full-height canted bay window. The left-hand return features a stone classical doorcase approached by semi-circular steps, with flanking four-light windows set at the base of a full-height chimney stack. The western wing, set at right angles to the entrance front, has two projecting bays, one rising above the eaves with a hipped roof. The right-hand return contains a canted bay window supporting an openwork stone balcony to a six-light window set within a Flemish gable. The south front displays a similar style with a double-height bay window, a canted bay window beneath a Flemish gable, and a double-height semi-circular bay window. The north-east stable yard facade includes a polygonal lift tower with staggered windows. A buttressed racquet court to the left contains an iron door from the condemned cell of Newgate Prison. To the right, a Flemish gabled projecting wing has a top-floor canted oriel window. East from this wing runs the original garden wall, fronted in the courtyard by a later single-storey wing attached to the stables. The stables have Flemish gables to all first-floor small-paned windows. On the rear wall facing the garden is a timber-framed and brick garderobe supported on stone corbels with a single-pitch tiled roof, and a double-arched seat niche. Both house and stables retain some old enriched lead rainwater heads, pipes, and tanks, the oldest dated 1728.

The interior contains a great variety of seventeenth-century panelling rescued from demolished buildings and high-quality late nineteenth-century woodwork. The double-height panelled inner entrance hall is lit by a full-height bay window and features an oak Jacobean-style chimneypiece, an open-well stair, and a first-floor gallery; the stairs originally bore carved angels on the newel posts. A subsidiary hall contains painted seventeenth-century panelling depicting flowers and berries with a guilloche frieze, probably Dutch. The former drawing room, now the ante-room, features limed chestnut Elizabethan jewel panelling and a chimneypiece from Hinchingbrooke Hall, together with a fine Jacobean-style plaster ceiling by Laurence Turner. The panelled former dining room is now known as the Cunliffe Room. The former smoking room, now the Mess Bar, is panelled with a carved chimneypiece featuring arcading on caryatides. The elaborate ceiling in this room, also by Laurence Turner, depicts Tudor roses, fleur-de-lis, and rabbits, the latter in recognition of the family name. Originally white, it was later painted in bright colours by a railway coach and carriage painter from the North Eastern Railway (source of the Cunliffe wealth), who left his signature of a ladybird in one corner and a bee in the opposite. The former billiard room, now the dining room, is oak-panelled with patterned carved pilasters, frieze, doorcases, and chimneypiece, and contains a seventeenth-century door traditionally referred to as "Pepys Door". The oak back-stairs include a lift-shaft originally used to haul coal. Most first-floor rooms retain panelling and features. The Cromwell Room contains fine panelling and a chimneypiece from the house in St Ives that belonged to Cromwell's sister, Robina; the wardrobe door is the main door from the bedroom of the original house. The attics housed the schoolroom and nursery. The former day nursery retains its open-beamed roof, left unceiled at Baroness Cunliffe's decision. The former schoolroom, above the Cromwell Room, features a ceramic tile map depicting the North Eastern Railway.

Walter Cunliffe was given the original farmhouse estate of some 300 acres in 1880 by his father on condition he pursue a banking career rather than farming. The family fortune was made by Walter's grandfather, James Cunliffe, through his development of the North Eastern Railway, on which Stephenson's "Rocket" ran. During 1940-45, the house was requisitioned as Canadian Forces Headquarters. After the war, it was purchased by the Trustees of the Royal Air Force Pilots and Crews Fund, established as a memorial by the Chartered Auctioneers and Estate Agents Institute, and leased to the RAF as a rehabilitation centre. Edward Warren, articled to G F Bodley, was an accomplished architect designing churches, colleges, mansion flats, and country houses, working primarily in late seventeenth or early eighteenth-century style, and served as Master of the Art Workers' Guild in 1913. Laurence Turner, brother of architect Thackery Turner, was renowned for his carving in wood and stone and undertook many prestigious commissions, including ceilings at Hampton Court.