Plans submitted to demolish Northamptonshire stately home following two fires and vandalism

The owner of a Northampton stately home has applied to demolish it after concluding a “miraculous restoration” will never happen.

Overstone Hall was mostly destroyed following a fire in 2001 and the Grade II listed landmark has also been damaged by vandalism and bad weather.

Barry Howard Homes bought the hall, along with 35 acres of land around it, in 2015. The site was purchased with the “absolute intentions” of restoring it, however, following extensive work, the company has concluded no plan was viable.

Firefighters were called to the hall in March this year to put out a fire, which experts said was probably started deliberately. Northamptonshire Fire and Rescue Service said there were signs of forced entry.

The building was built for Lord and Lady Overstone in the 1860s. But Lord Overstone wrote of his “unmitigated disappointment” about it and said it was “very large and full of pretension”.

It was used as a girls’ boarding school from the 1920s until 1979. It was bought by the New Testament Church of God in 1980. Part of the building unaffected by the fire was used for retirement flats from 2008 to 2014.

In an often florid planning document prepared for Barry Howard Homes, agents said the hope of the hall being restored is like “waiting for Godot” and irrationally optimistic.

“Time is not on the side of Overstone Hall, it will not restore itself. The reality is that no one has identified a strategy to secure the full restoration of Overstone Hall during the past 20 years.

“The proposition that a suitable strategy might be identified in the future is [in] ‘Alice in Wonderland’ terms, ‘chasing a white rabbit’. No public interest is served by such a fantasy,” the statement said.

The developer said it had previously tried to work with authorities on viable restoration plans. They have included potentially using Overstone Hall as a care home, a restaurant, a training facility, a hotel, offices and homes. They would each have cost at least £24m, papers state.

In 2019, Barry Howard Homes was given permission to restore the hall by the former Daventry District Council. But a plan to use it for apartments and another 52 homes on the land around it was rejected. The developer said that made the project unviable.

In the planning application for demolition submitted to West Northamptonshire Council, the developer is said to have “taken all reasonable action to arrest the decline of the remaining parts” of the hall. It said a tarpaulin covering a wing has “deteriorated” because of wind.