Grade II listed building is re-assembled after 200-mile journey.
Mobile home with a difference.
By Lindsey Shaughnessy.
A 350-year-old house has started another life as a family home five miles down the road. Platt Hall, a Grade II listed building built in Northwich in 1631, has completed a life-saving 200-mile round trip and finally come to rest on a country estate at Bostock. Before its epic move, the once dilapidated building had stood empty for more than two decades dwarfed by th efactory towers at Brunner Mond’s Lostock Works.
After three previous failed attempts to move it, the black and white half-timbered building was dismantled piece by piece and transported to Leominster in Herefordshire where it was lovingly restored by Border Oak Design, specialist designers and builders of oak-framed houses. The frame was then driven back the 100 miles to a site in the grounds of Bostock Hall, where it was re-erected. While it was still in kit form in Border Oak’s yard, new owners David and Polly Golden bought the house, unseen, for £375,000. Mr Golden, from Chester, a former director of British Nuclear Fuels and North West Water, said: “Watching it go up was fascinating.”
The experience of seeing their home being put together like a jigsaw puzzle is not new to the Goldens. The couple’s 18th century former home at Rowton Hall Farm was taken down to the frame and rebuilt, so they knew what was possible and were not deterred by the decaying wreck they saw in the yard. Mr Golden explained: “There’s something about a very old house with a history. It has a certain feel that cannot be captured in a new house. I had seen the building many years before when I visited Lostock. But I must admit, when I saw it in bits, I found it hard to imagine how it could possibly turn out to look like this.”
The saga of the mobile home began two years ago when research into the epic project began. In February last year a specialist from Lancaster University carried out an extensive archaeological survey on the hall and said that if it had stayed where it was, it would not have survived much longer. Weeks later the building was dismantled and each timber was photographed and labelled before transportation to Hereford. “The alternative would have been to record and demolish it,” said Ralph Brocklehurst, technical director of the P.J. Livesey Group, which undertook the £12 million redevelopment of the 156-acre Bostock Hall site. “It is immensely rewarding to see it restored for use as a family home again, knowing that a new generation of owners can relish its history and add their own chapters.”
The hall, which has a new wing built on the side, has now been given a life expectancy of another 300 to 400 years.
Ghost upset by moving house.
Platt Hall has its own tale of the unexpected. A week after David and Polly Golden moved into their new, old home, something happened which simply cannot be explained. Mr Golden said: “I don’t believe in ghosts, but certain things have happened since we moved in that cannot easily be explained.” Before the oak-panelled dining room was fully furnished, Mrs Golden put some decorative plates on shelves just below ceiling level. “We sleep in the bedroom above the dining room and at around 2am one morning I thought I heard a noise coming from the room below. I came down the stairs and the re was a plate on the floor right in the middle of the room. A couple of hours later, I heard a crash, went down again and another plate had shattered in the middle of the room. Now quite how they got into the middle of the floor we just don’t know. Surely if they had simply fallen from the shelves, they would have landed on the floor underneath, not in the middle of the room? I have stories about ghosts, but I have said it’s all rubbish, I have still not seen a ghost, but I cannot say how those plates came to be on the dining room floor.”
Platt Hall amid the chimneys of Brunner Mond’s Lostock site before it was dismantled and restored.
New residents David and Polly Golden at Platt Hall, now situated at Bostock Hall.
The fully restored timbers are fitted together and the building begins to take shape at its new site at Bostock Hall.
Workmen started the extraordinary task of dismantling Platt Hall, piece by piece, in January 1998.
Winsford Chronicle, 17th February 1999.