Previously, we had seen the struggle for survival of the ‘Parrott House’ in Stretton on Dunsmore. Threatened with demolition, a solution had been found where the house was bought by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC) for re-erection. Great care is taken with the house’s removal and Paul Woodfield, conservation officer for MKDC, draws the building in detail, including elevations1. The plans to restore the house in Milton Keynes fall through, however, and the frame is stored at Bradwell Abbey.
A new decade
The frame is still at Bradwell Abbey in 1981 when a report on the building and its possible uses is written – part of a request by the EMC in 1979 for a “comprehensive report and recommendations on all MKDC owned properties including proposed uses”. This is not to say, however, that the building is forgotten. Indeed, showing a care for its history and heritage, the relatives of Mr. Parrott are contacted in 1979, to say the house is in safe keeping. It is a conscious decision by Mr. Woodfield to keep the relatives informed, both for their own interest, and because they may have been able to help with information when the house came to be rebuilt.
Part of a larger building
By the time the house is rebuilt, however, its original saviour has moved on from the MKDC. The frame is used as part of a larger building, a detached family home. In Woodfield’s view, he does not find the building satisfactory where it is. The original intention to rebuild it properly, and restore it, has not been followed; the resultant house is not as intended.
In context, however, there is a trend towards timber framed buildings where it is erected, so it does not look overly out of place. The house from Stretton has found a home itself, after a number of years looking.
With thanks to the Centre for Buckinghamshire Studies for their assistance in finding archive material within their work in progress MKDC catalogue.
1 Interview with author.
Comments
It was erected on one of Milton Keynes’s “self-build plots” which were sold as single plots of land to individuals or small builders to erect the design of their choice. Many of these have timber-framed kit houses and so I’d assumed this one was from a kit. I supposed it was in a way! It is quite distinctive but it certainly doesn’t look as if it is centuries old.
I’m afraid that Gill isn’t quite right because the “Stretton House” (as we came to know it in MK) was not rebuilt as part of a self-build but by a developer. The full story around the re-erection deserves to be told and this is the appropriate place.
By way of background I was a chartered surveyor with Milton Keynes Development Corporation in the 1980s, dealing with the sale of land to developers. MKDC had looked at various schemes involving the Stretton House, none of which came to fruition due to the costs involved and the constraints of the frame itself. However a fire elsewhere in MK provided the opportunity for a creative solution. A group of derelict farm barns (at Manor Farm, Great Woolstone) that we had intended to offer for redevelopment were damaged in an arson attack, which was bad enough to mean that the only course of action was to demolish them rather than rebuild.
In such circumstances there is a risk that we would have lost the insurance money because we were not spending it upon rebuilding the insured property but the insurers agreed to our suggestion that we should put the money towards to rebuilding of the Stretton House on a site elsewhere in Milton Keynes. To our delight, they agreed. We therefore found a suitable site, which we packaged up with some adjacent building land to make it a viable commercial package and sold it to a developer (William Sindall’s) who we selected due to their expertise in working with historic buildings. Their architects were Fielden and Mawson.
It proved to be an ideal way of rebuilding the Stretton House and was typical of the creative processes that typified the creation of Milton Keynes.
Hi Tim, thanks for that. Greatly appreciated to add some more detail!
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