| Description | Wentworth House, Wakefield. 1802 05 century high status town house. Now part of a girls school.
'Substantial merchant's house of 1802 5. 3 storeys and blank basement, seven windows. Three central bays project slightly. Red brick with stone basement, 1st floor cill band, modillion eaves cornice. Gauged flat brick arches and stone cills to altered windows, mainly sashes though one or two are modern casements. Wide flight of five stone steps to door with plain fanlight in architrave with impost blocks, the whole a in prostyle Roman Doric porch with segmental pediment. House built for John Pemberton Heywood, barrister and son of a local cloth merchant'.
(English Heritage listed building description. Date listed 30/03/1971. http://list.english heritage.org.uk/resultsingle.aspx?uid=1258722. Web site accessed 03/12/2013).
Wentworth House was the subject of an archaeological assessment by Colum Giles in 1979 as part of the WYAS/RCHME Rural Houses Survey. The sketch plan is held by WYAAS (Giles, C. (WYAS/RCHME). 1979). The fieldwork report is transcribed below:
'This is a brick house of the early 19th century, built by John Pemberton Heywood, a barrister of Wakefield, who died c.1835. It has three storeys and faces east onto Wentworth Street, with gardens at the rear. On plan it is double pile, the rooms being contained within a simple rectangle. Later additions, sub divisions and changes of use have obscured many details of the original plan and room use.
The east front has a central entry opening into an entrance hall. This is flanked by the two main reception rooms, and leads through to a transverse passage. At the west end of the passage is the main stair. This has iron balusters and a slender hand rail, and is lit by a tri partite window at landing level. The rear of the house has further rooms, the function of which are now unclear. The first and second floors are broadly similar in layout, apart from the fact that three main rooms face east onto Wentworth Street, instead of the two rooms and entrance hall of the ground floor. Some early 19th century decoration survives.
There is no sign on the ground floor of a kitchen. It might be supposed that the kitchen was in an outbuilding which has now been replaced by later blocks adjoining to the south and north. There are, however stronger indications that the kitchen was in the basement. The basement is extensive, and provides ample storage for fuel, food and drink, and in the south west corner of the basement is a large room with a high ceiling. There is a stack on its west wall of sufficient size to have acted as the main cooking stack, and another indication that this room is in fact the kitchen is its proximity to a staircase leading up beneath the main stair. This would have given easy access from the kitchen to the ground floor dining area, which was, presumably, located at the front of the house.
The outbuildings to the north west include the original stable block.
(Giles, C. (WYAS/RCHME). 1979. 'Wentworth House, Wentworth Street, Wakefield').
Wentworth house opened as a girl's school in 1878. In 1917 it was given up for two years to the Northern Command for use as an auxiliary military hospital (Taylor, K. 1976). |