Hall Estate

photograph by courtesy of Mrs J. Aldous of Chediston Hall.

Walter Plumer seems to have taken an interest in the manorial lands of Chediston in the 1730s. In addition to purchasing the lordship of Chediston manor, in 1739 he also bought the Manor of Halesworth from Thomas Betts. At this time the Plumer family seems to have had property in Newmarket, but their ancestral home was in Hertfordshire. In any event they were absentee landlords. After Walter’s death the property passed to his brother William. William died in 1767 and his son, also named William, succeeded. For most of the 18th century the Hall seems to have been rented to the Beales and Baas families.

photograph by courtesy of Mrs J. Aldous of Chediston Hall.

The first Beales of Chediston was recorded in a church memorial dated 1787. The first memorial to a Baas appears in 1806. The last Baas to rent the property was Robert, a member of the Yarmouth branch of the family, who took up the tenancy in 1811. The last of the Plumers, Jane, the wife of William the Younger, died in 1831 and Chediston Hall was bought by George Parkyns two years later. After the sale Robert Baas moved out to Halesworth. This was the property described as ‘a large and elegant mansion in the Tudor style, ornamented with towers, turrets, pinnacles, and an embattled pediment, standing on a bold elevation to the north of the river, facing south’ (Fig 1). This raises the question as to when this property was built.. In Hodskinson's 1783 map of Suffolk, Chediston Hall is represented by a small drawing of a building with two gabled wings. This was probably built in the first half of the 17th century when Sir John Pettus, a rich Norwich merchant held the manor and resided in Chediston.

The first OS maps of the 1880s depict the Hall dwarfed by substantial outbuildings enclosing a large courtyard. Although these outbuildings have been largely destroyed, sufficient remains to show that they were brick-built and constructed in the same grand, semi Tudor style as the Hall. The complex seem to have consisted of large barns and stables indicating that this was the centre of a very large agricultural estate, which probably also served Cookley Grange (developed by the Cistercian monks of Sibton Abbey) on the opposite side of the valley to Chediston Hall. (The Grange was in the ownership of Walter Plumer when he died in 1745. After passing through several generations of the Plumer family it was eventually purchased by George Parkins in 1833/4).

The style of the building depicted the photographs is a Tudor/Jacobean hybrid with elements that place it in the first quarter of the 19th century. It was designed by the fashionable architect of the period, Edward Blore.

Chediston Hall and its surroundings circa 1880. The red dotted line follows the parish boundary between Chediston and Wissett.

The Hall was taken over for military purposes during the Second World War and housed Italian prisoners. During this time it was damaged by fire. After the War the estate was purchased by an investment company of the Metropolitan Railway and the derelict Hall was demolished. The estate was eventually bought by Mr and Mrs Aldous. A new house was built on the site of the hall and the remaining usable outbuildings were adapted for modern farming.

Hall and outbuildings in 2007

View south across the Blyth valley from the modern house . Below are the remains of the outbuildings including a great brick built barn, which gives some idea of the scale of the Victorian hall.

Edward Blore

The Tudor house was rebuilt circa 1830. The architect was Edward Blore b. 1790, was an architect, who was responsible for the numerous buildings and their additions. He died 1879 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery, London. The following is a list of his most significant commissions.

East wing of Buckingham Palace

By 1829 the costs had escalated to nearly half a million pounds. Nash's extravagance cost him his job, and on the death of George IV in 1830, his younger brother William IV took on Edward Blore to finish the work. The King never moved into the Palace. Indeed, when the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire in 1834, the King offered the Palace as a new home for Parliament, but the offer was declined.

Queen Victoria was the first sovereign to take up residence in July 1837, just three weeks after her accession, and in June 1838 she was the first British sovereign to leave from Buckingham Palace for a Coronation. Her marriage to Prince Albert in 1840 soon showed up the Palace's shortcomings. A serious problem for the newly married couple was the absence of any nurseries and too few bedrooms for visitors. The only solution was to move the Marble Arch - it now stands at the north-east corner of Hyde Park - and build a fourth wing, thereby creating a quadrangle.

Blore, the architect in charge, created the East Front and, thanks largely to his builder, Thomas Cubitt, the costs were reduced from £150,000 to £106,000. The cost of the new wing was largely covered by the sale of George IV's Royal Pavilion at Brighton. Blore added an attic floor to the main block of the Palace and decorated it externally with marble friezes originally intended for Nash's Marble Arch. The work was completed in 1847. By the turn of the century the soft French stone used in Blore's East Front was showing signs of deterioration, largely due to London's notorious soot, and required replacing. In 1913 the decision was taken to reface..."

Choir in Westerminster Abbey

Government House in Sydney

A palace in Russia

Halpur facade -now a shopping centre

Wiston House in Sussex

" The 19th century was another period of enthusiasm for reconstructing historic houses. Wiston House was again remodelled in the 1830s by a then fashionable architect, Edward Blore (1797-1879). Blore proposed to demolish the Tudor structure, leaving the Great Hall as a 'picturesque ruin' in the Park, and build an entirely new house on another site. Fortunately, he had to be content with altering and largely rebuilding the south wing of the House. Outside on the north wall of this wing are two unified overmantels, long thought to have been placed there by Blore. The rectangular lower section, with lively martial figures between colonettes, is typical work of the 1570s and perhaps Game from Sir Thomas Sherley's Great Chamber - it would have been to small for the Great Hall. The upper stonework appears to belong to a later date, probably of Cranfield's 1620s completion of the house. It is now thought that these pieces were brought together and placed in their present position in the 1740s, during the Batty Langley period".

Families at The Grange (Hall ) 1891

Helen de Lacroix (left) at the 'Stone of Ched' with Miss Margery Upcher (right), daughter of the Rector of Halesworth Vicar of Chediston; she was Helen's future sister-in-law. (1913)

Note about the de Lacroix and Parkyns families by Frank Leguen de Lacroix (Jan. 2008)

"Chediston Hall belonged to George Parkyns (originally from Bunny in Nottinghamshire). His son died before him and the estate passed to his sister Marie Clare Parkyns who was the wife of my great great great grandfather François Leguen de Lacroix, the so called "last corsair of St Malo" in Britanny. Leguen de Lacroix and Parkyns had shared experiences trading in the far east after the Napoleonic wars in which they had fought on opposite sides. Parkyns' widow, who re-married and became Mrs Rant, had the use of the Hall, paying rent to remain there with her new husband until, when she died, my great grandfather Eugene Louis Leguen de Lacroix took possession. He married Helen Groom of Chediston Grange. The girl on the above photo is Helen, their daughter, who died in Ceylon. The eldest son was Eugene (my grandfather) who spent most of his life in S Africa and inherited the estate on the death of his father in 1936. Other sons were William (who died in California), Rancliffe, Fleetwood, Aleth, Clement and Beric. Clement, Aleth and Beric lived in and around Halesworth for most of their lives. My father Eugene Thomas Parkyns Leguen de Lacroix sold the estate and farms in the mid fifties but still lives in Suffolk. I remember visiting the Hall as a child but it was uninhabitable due to a fire which had destroyed much of the building".