June 2010
Sales particulars for Nuthall Temple, 1817
Reference: DD 713/18
In 1817 an auction was held at Thurland Hall in Nottingham for the sale of Nuthall Temple, a large Italianate-style mansion located northwest of Nottingham, with its estates including the village of Nuthall and 1,200 acres of land. This sales catalogue was produced to accompany the sale, and describes in detail the various lots. These included a number of cottages; a farm; and various pieces of land. In each case the acreage of the property and its current occupier is recorded. The particulars also include a plan of the estate, which also features an elevation of the mansion.
In 1819 the estate came up for sale again and an auction was held at Garroway’s Coffee House, ‘Change Alley, Cornhill. The sales particular accompanying this sale (DD 713/19) describes the house itself in some detail. A ‘beautiful and unique villa’, it contained:
- An octagonal entrance hall, lighted by a dome
- A breakfast room, a dining room hung with green flock paper and a ‘noble bowed principal eating room’
- An ‘elegant drawing room’ with gilt mouldings, Venetian windows and pilasters
- A library with a marble chimneypiece
- A number of bedchambers including a State Bed Chamber with carved wood dressings
- A nursery, with a Venetian window opening to a balcony
- Nine sleeping rooms for servants
- Offices in the basement including a housekeeper’s room with ‘water laid on, fitted up with a dresser and shelves’
- A paved servants’ hall, closets, a butler’s pantry and a beer cellar
- A kitchen with larder, pantry and salting room.
The approach to the mansion is described as ‘through a fine grove, with a gravelled carriage sweep to the mansion, the ascent by a double flight of stone steps, with a magnificent screen of Corinthian columns supporting a pediment’. The pleasure grounds include a lake of fifteen acres, an extensive kitchen garden, a flower garden, an ice house, stables, a cow house, pens and sheds, a turkey house, a dog kennel, a stack yard, piggery, coal house and blacksmith’s shop.
Among the estate buildings is a cottage which was being used as a school house and in the occupation of Ann Walsh. The farm includes labourers’ cottages, a yard and a garden. Each of the different fields and closes are listed with the crop grown there or if they are used for pasture. The farm grew barley, peas, wheat and potatoes. The farm was in the occupation of Robert Mackley, tenant. The estate also included a number of woods and a coal seam and other minerals underground. The catalogue concludes by saying ‘the estate abounds with game, and is in the vicinity of several packs of hounds; genteel neighbourhood, and a very eligible property for the residence of a gentleman’.
Nuthall Temple was built for Sir Charles Sedley, Nottingham MP, between 1754 and 1757, and designed by the architect Thomas Wright in the Palladian style. The house was demolished in 1929 and the remaining ruins were flattened and buried for the construction of the M1 motorway in 1966.
See the sales particulars cover in more detail here [PDF 4261KB] 
See the sales plan in more detail here [PDF 2098KB]
See the cover of the particulars for the sale of 1819 [PDF 3592KB]
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