It’s tempting to point out the coincidences at Nocton Hall. Twice requisitioned during the two World Wars, it was twice pushed into use as a medical facility. It was also twice taken over by the USAF after a period of occupation by the RAF. And it twice had owners who hardly ever lived there.
But there was a more tragic coincidence as well; it has also burned down twice.
The house was now just a shell, standing forlornly in its overgrown grounds, surrounded by the smashed rubble of its elegantly carved stone windows and Victorian brickwork. However, whilst the house itself was a picturesque ruin, there was more to discover in its dark and cold basement.
Nocton is a quiet village lost in the patchwork of roads, fields and woods of Lincolnshire. Despite its relative remoteness, it was selected as a site for a war hospital, built for the servicemen of the RAF for the many surrounding airbases. Therefore the small village doubled in size as a huge, prefabricated hospital was thrown up in 1943.
Even today, with the hospital now derelict and overgrown, its military ranks of pavilion wards dominates satellite images of the village, but you’d be hard pressed to find it from the ground. Nocton’s quiet sleepy streets weren’t overshadowed by this hospital; the focal point was the remains of its hall.
It was on the only summer’s day of 2008 that Marlon and I walked the quiet rural footpaths of Nocton and approached the hall from its western drive. Finding the hall was easy as we simply followed the directions on the village notice board. It was all very civilised.
Even from a distance, it was clear that the main part of the hall was simply an empty shell. The fire (a multiple source fire started by arsonists) was ferocious and the roof and floors had caved in leaving the interior strewn with rubble. Many of the walls now stood in a precarious condition, presumably simply resting up on each other. As a ruin, it looked like one which could come down at any time.
A stone tablet related the house’s history in Latin. Originally an 18th century manor house built for the Ellys family, the first hall burnt down in 1834. It was subsequently rebuilt in 1841 in a Tudor style for Robert Hobart, the first Earl Of Ripon, and secretary of state.
The small northern annexe to the building had miraculously survived the roaring fire and was still mostly intact. It even still sported an elegant Victorian clock face, although the hands had long since stopped.
We circled the blasted building anticlockwise, picking our way carefully through the brambles and nettles of the overgrown gardens. The Tudor style chimneys towered over the gutted wreck; the stone mullioned windows were backlit by blue sky; and overgrown and unchecked ivy grew over the central bay window.
The southern face presented an even sorrier sight with the central ground floor windows completely smashed out; the south eastern gable completely collapsed and the elegant steps and walls joining the house now buried under tons of masonry.
Much of the brickwork was still in an extremely fragile state with either carved stone or bricks threatening to fall at any moment. It was difficult to see what was keeping most of this fragile shell standing.
Was there any point in venturing into such a dangerous looking structure? From our walk around the building, it was clear that little remained inside and clambering over rubble surrounded by these teetering walls wasn’t a sensible suggestion.
Nocton Hall had a secret and I was determined to find my way in there to discover it.
A snaking semi-sunken corridor appeared to offer a relatively safe way into the depths of the hall. This connected the hall to a small nursing home; a modern brick built building to the north east of the site. This was built when the hall itself became a nursing home in the early 1980s, and by coincidence, had also been reduced to a smoking wreck by arsonists.
Despite the relative safety of this covered way, we still had mounds of bricks to navigate within the shell of Nocton Hall itself, before finding the sanctuary of the northern annexe.
It was almost as if the fire simply stopped along a vertical plane between the northern annexe and the rest of the house. I suspect it was probably more to do with the lower roof line and fire doors rather than some strange supernatural force.
The annexe felt institutionalised with its plain, tired decoration. There was very little (if any) of the house’s original fixtures here. This is not surprising given how the house was first leased to the forces as a convalescent home for young American offices in 1917. The following year it was sold to a William H. Dennis, who didn’t like village life, and so the hall remained partially vacant (and presumably unchanged).
We found ramshackle and drab kitchens, all made more miserable by the soot covered windows. Original fixtures and fittings could’ve been hidden under the bland ceiling tiles, but at the moment, this could’ve been a room in any building, anywhere.
We found a staircase and took it down to the cellars. It was in these dark, damp passages that some of the history of Nocton Hall came to life. This network of passages, dark rooms and unexpected dead ends was used as a shelter during the Second World War; and much evidence of this use remained.
We were under the annexe in the northern part of the house. Double doors with a wheelchair ramp (with a wheelchair still balanced upon it) lead from the warm, light world outside into this dark and musty time capsule. Many shelter signs were still painted on the walls, each with a letter indicating a particular shelter.
The boiler house was opposite but had been mostly stripped.
The floor was littered with detritus from the cellar’s wartime use, modern rubbish and building rubble from the recent fire.
In one part of the cellars, falling bricks and masonry from the fire had caused the collapse of some of the cellars. Cast iron radiators hung above us, only held in place by rusting pipes connected to cracked walls.
We didn’t linger here but carried on into the dark cellars of the southern part of the house.
Two staircases remained with the main body of the house. All the floors they lead to had now gone, and the staircases themselves were full of holes from the sheer force of the masonry and bricks crashing down from the upper walls and roof. The basements of these stairs were choked with rubble and twisted metal.
However, most of the cellars in the southern part of the house survived intact and presented a quiet, dark, peaceful environment compared with the utter destruction raged above.
Standing empty with its non-incumbent owner often away, Nocton Hall was ripe for wartime acquisition. In 1940 it was acquired by the Air Ministry and pushed into use as an RAF Hospital (the second time the building was used as a hospital). Such a move was temporary; Nocton Hall was ideally suited as a central hospital for the airfields littered around Lincolnshire but the hall itself was too small. With the hall being used as a “clearing station”, a huge new wartime hospital was built in the grounds and the hall became an officers club.
It was probably during this period that the underground cellars and passages were converted into the shelters we were now exploring.
Whilst many of the rooms were clearly marked as shelters, others remained anonymous. This southerly cellar was probably used as a store, but the lone chair and blocked and plastered window now gave it a more ominous feeling.
Just as the new hospital was completed in 1943, the Americans took procession again. The new modern hospital was redubbed the “United States Army Seventh General Hospital” whilst the hall became their rather swanky new officers’ club. At the end of the war, the RAF took it back over, and rechristened it RAF Nocton Hall, a permanent hospital for the county of Lincolnshire, with 740 beds available for servicemen and the general public from the neighbouring villages.
The hospital closed in 1983 with Nocton Hall returning again to private ownership.
Parts of the basement resembled a time capsule although the modern desk and equally modern chair felt much older when viewed in a crumbling, decaying room with everything covered in peeling paint.
More tunnels lead from this subterranean office, further passageways and storerooms, many labelled as shelters.
The ordering of the letters didn’t appear to follow any pattern. Shelter ‘Y’ was at the other end of the building from Shelter ‘X’, and was directly opposite Shelter ‘F’.
In 1983, the hall was purchased by Torrie Richardson (the hospital in the grounds had also closed but was leased back to the USAF the following year). His plan was to convert the building into a residential home, and he sold the cottages in the grounds to raise funds for the building’s conversion. (He probably also supervised the building of the modern building to north east and its long connecting passage.)
However, the home ran into difficulties and was closed. The hall was eventually sold by the receivers to Leda Properties, Oxford in 1995; they also purchased the now redundant hospital so the hall and the hospital were once again reunited under one owner. But, unfortunately, Leda Properties were as absent as former owner William H. Dennis, leaving the hall empty and unoccupied whilst they drew up their redevelopment plans.
One of the rooms within the basement still had a sign on the door. Without this, there was no way of telling this empty part of the cellar from any other: all mostly empty with rubble on the floor.
The bars on the window gave the room adjacent to the stores the bleak characteristic of a holding cell. In reality, the bars were simply to prevent thefts from the stores. But with its curved ceiling, mildewed plaster, missing floorboards and one lone chair, it felt like a prison cell for the condemned.
We left the dark, cold and damp cellars by the southernmost exit, which was almost blocked by rubble from the collapsing house above. With the exception of the tunnels in the northern part of the house, the cellars had survived the collapse of the house well – one is tempted to say they would’ve survived war time damage as well.
On the 24th October 2004, several fires were started in the empty Nocton Hall. Despite the valiant attempts of 70 fire-fighters, the main part of the house was destroyed, leaving a smoking shell. Whilst investigations showed without doubt that it was arson, no-one was ever charged.
The hall and adjoining hospital are still owned by Leda Properties, and they still have plans for the redevelopment of the site. But with a crumbling Grade II listed property (already extensively damaged whilst under their ownership), problems with planning applications and objections from local residents, process has been extremely slow.
With the credit crunch causing a massive slow-down of the house building programmes across the UK, it would seem that Nocton Hall isn’t going to be redeveloped in the near future either.
This is a real shame. An enterprising individual could take on just the hall, living in the newly restored annex (which doesn’t require too much work to make it habitable). From there, the more leisurely and time consuming process of stabilising the walls of the manor house, replacing the floors, renewing the roof and repairing the windows could be a worthwhile project and pull the hall back from the brink.
And as Lincolnshire Council beginning to make noises about the lack of progress from Leda Developments, the hall might be put on the market again.
In drawing up grandiose schemes for the huge old hospital site, and including the hall as part, Leda Developments allowed it to stand empty and unused for too long. For the second time in its history, Nocton Hall is a smoking ruin. Perhaps, for a third time, it’ll rise phoenix-like from the ashes and be restored.
I’ve often spoken of John Harris, a self-confessed country house snooper who explored many derelict and dilapidated country houses in the wake of the Second World War. Their owners were either killed in the war, financially crippled by punitive death duties or unable to maintain damaged or vandalised properties. These unfortunate properties littered post-war Britain, but it was sobering to discover a property in a sorry state, with a similar history, over fifty years later.
We bid it farewell and moved onto the next site; the enormous RAF hospital built in its grounds.
All the best,
Simon
But there was a more tragic coincidence as well; it has also burned down twice.
The house was now just a shell, standing forlornly in its overgrown grounds, surrounded by the smashed rubble of its elegantly carved stone windows and Victorian brickwork. However, whilst the house itself was a picturesque ruin, there was more to discover in its dark and cold basement.
Nocton is a quiet village lost in the patchwork of roads, fields and woods of Lincolnshire. Despite its relative remoteness, it was selected as a site for a war hospital, built for the servicemen of the RAF for the many surrounding airbases. Therefore the small village doubled in size as a huge, prefabricated hospital was thrown up in 1943.
Even today, with the hospital now derelict and overgrown, its military ranks of pavilion wards dominates satellite images of the village, but you’d be hard pressed to find it from the ground. Nocton’s quiet sleepy streets weren’t overshadowed by this hospital; the focal point was the remains of its hall.
It was on the only summer’s day of 2008 that Marlon and I walked the quiet rural footpaths of Nocton and approached the hall from its western drive. Finding the hall was easy as we simply followed the directions on the village notice board. It was all very civilised.
Even from a distance, it was clear that the main part of the hall was simply an empty shell. The fire (a multiple source fire started by arsonists) was ferocious and the roof and floors had caved in leaving the interior strewn with rubble. Many of the walls now stood in a precarious condition, presumably simply resting up on each other. As a ruin, it looked like one which could come down at any time.
A stone tablet related the house’s history in Latin. Originally an 18th century manor house built for the Ellys family, the first hall burnt down in 1834. It was subsequently rebuilt in 1841 in a Tudor style for Robert Hobart, the first Earl Of Ripon, and secretary of state.
The small northern annexe to the building had miraculously survived the roaring fire and was still mostly intact. It even still sported an elegant Victorian clock face, although the hands had long since stopped.
We circled the blasted building anticlockwise, picking our way carefully through the brambles and nettles of the overgrown gardens. The Tudor style chimneys towered over the gutted wreck; the stone mullioned windows were backlit by blue sky; and overgrown and unchecked ivy grew over the central bay window.
The southern face presented an even sorrier sight with the central ground floor windows completely smashed out; the south eastern gable completely collapsed and the elegant steps and walls joining the house now buried under tons of masonry.
Much of the brickwork was still in an extremely fragile state with either carved stone or bricks threatening to fall at any moment. It was difficult to see what was keeping most of this fragile shell standing.
Was there any point in venturing into such a dangerous looking structure? From our walk around the building, it was clear that little remained inside and clambering over rubble surrounded by these teetering walls wasn’t a sensible suggestion.
Nocton Hall had a secret and I was determined to find my way in there to discover it.
A snaking semi-sunken corridor appeared to offer a relatively safe way into the depths of the hall. This connected the hall to a small nursing home; a modern brick built building to the north east of the site. This was built when the hall itself became a nursing home in the early 1980s, and by coincidence, had also been reduced to a smoking wreck by arsonists.
Despite the relative safety of this covered way, we still had mounds of bricks to navigate within the shell of Nocton Hall itself, before finding the sanctuary of the northern annexe.
It was almost as if the fire simply stopped along a vertical plane between the northern annexe and the rest of the house. I suspect it was probably more to do with the lower roof line and fire doors rather than some strange supernatural force.
The annexe felt institutionalised with its plain, tired decoration. There was very little (if any) of the house’s original fixtures here. This is not surprising given how the house was first leased to the forces as a convalescent home for young American offices in 1917. The following year it was sold to a William H. Dennis, who didn’t like village life, and so the hall remained partially vacant (and presumably unchanged).
We found ramshackle and drab kitchens, all made more miserable by the soot covered windows. Original fixtures and fittings could’ve been hidden under the bland ceiling tiles, but at the moment, this could’ve been a room in any building, anywhere.
We found a staircase and took it down to the cellars. It was in these dark, damp passages that some of the history of Nocton Hall came to life. This network of passages, dark rooms and unexpected dead ends was used as a shelter during the Second World War; and much evidence of this use remained.
We were under the annexe in the northern part of the house. Double doors with a wheelchair ramp (with a wheelchair still balanced upon it) lead from the warm, light world outside into this dark and musty time capsule. Many shelter signs were still painted on the walls, each with a letter indicating a particular shelter.
The boiler house was opposite but had been mostly stripped.
The floor was littered with detritus from the cellar’s wartime use, modern rubbish and building rubble from the recent fire.
In one part of the cellars, falling bricks and masonry from the fire had caused the collapse of some of the cellars. Cast iron radiators hung above us, only held in place by rusting pipes connected to cracked walls.
We didn’t linger here but carried on into the dark cellars of the southern part of the house.
Two staircases remained with the main body of the house. All the floors they lead to had now gone, and the staircases themselves were full of holes from the sheer force of the masonry and bricks crashing down from the upper walls and roof. The basements of these stairs were choked with rubble and twisted metal.
However, most of the cellars in the southern part of the house survived intact and presented a quiet, dark, peaceful environment compared with the utter destruction raged above.
Standing empty with its non-incumbent owner often away, Nocton Hall was ripe for wartime acquisition. In 1940 it was acquired by the Air Ministry and pushed into use as an RAF Hospital (the second time the building was used as a hospital). Such a move was temporary; Nocton Hall was ideally suited as a central hospital for the airfields littered around Lincolnshire but the hall itself was too small. With the hall being used as a “clearing station”, a huge new wartime hospital was built in the grounds and the hall became an officers club.
It was probably during this period that the underground cellars and passages were converted into the shelters we were now exploring.
Whilst many of the rooms were clearly marked as shelters, others remained anonymous. This southerly cellar was probably used as a store, but the lone chair and blocked and plastered window now gave it a more ominous feeling.
Just as the new hospital was completed in 1943, the Americans took procession again. The new modern hospital was redubbed the “United States Army Seventh General Hospital” whilst the hall became their rather swanky new officers’ club. At the end of the war, the RAF took it back over, and rechristened it RAF Nocton Hall, a permanent hospital for the county of Lincolnshire, with 740 beds available for servicemen and the general public from the neighbouring villages.
The hospital closed in 1983 with Nocton Hall returning again to private ownership.
Parts of the basement resembled a time capsule although the modern desk and equally modern chair felt much older when viewed in a crumbling, decaying room with everything covered in peeling paint.
More tunnels lead from this subterranean office, further passageways and storerooms, many labelled as shelters.
The ordering of the letters didn’t appear to follow any pattern. Shelter ‘Y’ was at the other end of the building from Shelter ‘X’, and was directly opposite Shelter ‘F’.
In 1983, the hall was purchased by Torrie Richardson (the hospital in the grounds had also closed but was leased back to the USAF the following year). His plan was to convert the building into a residential home, and he sold the cottages in the grounds to raise funds for the building’s conversion. (He probably also supervised the building of the modern building to north east and its long connecting passage.)
However, the home ran into difficulties and was closed. The hall was eventually sold by the receivers to Leda Properties, Oxford in 1995; they also purchased the now redundant hospital so the hall and the hospital were once again reunited under one owner. But, unfortunately, Leda Properties were as absent as former owner William H. Dennis, leaving the hall empty and unoccupied whilst they drew up their redevelopment plans.
One of the rooms within the basement still had a sign on the door. Without this, there was no way of telling this empty part of the cellar from any other: all mostly empty with rubble on the floor.
The bars on the window gave the room adjacent to the stores the bleak characteristic of a holding cell. In reality, the bars were simply to prevent thefts from the stores. But with its curved ceiling, mildewed plaster, missing floorboards and one lone chair, it felt like a prison cell for the condemned.
We left the dark, cold and damp cellars by the southernmost exit, which was almost blocked by rubble from the collapsing house above. With the exception of the tunnels in the northern part of the house, the cellars had survived the collapse of the house well – one is tempted to say they would’ve survived war time damage as well.
On the 24th October 2004, several fires were started in the empty Nocton Hall. Despite the valiant attempts of 70 fire-fighters, the main part of the house was destroyed, leaving a smoking shell. Whilst investigations showed without doubt that it was arson, no-one was ever charged.
The hall and adjoining hospital are still owned by Leda Properties, and they still have plans for the redevelopment of the site. But with a crumbling Grade II listed property (already extensively damaged whilst under their ownership), problems with planning applications and objections from local residents, process has been extremely slow.
With the credit crunch causing a massive slow-down of the house building programmes across the UK, it would seem that Nocton Hall isn’t going to be redeveloped in the near future either.
This is a real shame. An enterprising individual could take on just the hall, living in the newly restored annex (which doesn’t require too much work to make it habitable). From there, the more leisurely and time consuming process of stabilising the walls of the manor house, replacing the floors, renewing the roof and repairing the windows could be a worthwhile project and pull the hall back from the brink.
And as Lincolnshire Council beginning to make noises about the lack of progress from Leda Developments, the hall might be put on the market again.
In drawing up grandiose schemes for the huge old hospital site, and including the hall as part, Leda Developments allowed it to stand empty and unused for too long. For the second time in its history, Nocton Hall is a smoking ruin. Perhaps, for a third time, it’ll rise phoenix-like from the ashes and be restored.
I’ve often spoken of John Harris, a self-confessed country house snooper who explored many derelict and dilapidated country houses in the wake of the Second World War. Their owners were either killed in the war, financially crippled by punitive death duties or unable to maintain damaged or vandalised properties. These unfortunate properties littered post-war Britain, but it was sobering to discover a property in a sorry state, with a similar history, over fifty years later.
We bid it farewell and moved onto the next site; the enormous RAF hospital built in its grounds.
All the best,
Simon
