Swarkestone Pavilion

A grandstand view – but of what?

The excuse for building the majestic little Swarkestone Pavilion was to give a grandstand view of whatever went on in the enclosure in front of it. Suggestions range from the romantic (jousting) and the rough (bear-baiting) to the more prosaic (bowls). We think the latter most likely because there is evidence of a payment in 1632 for a ‘bowle alley house’. It was built by a mason, Richard Shepperd, but its design has been attributed to John Smythson, one of our first true architects and son of Robert, who built many notable houses in the Elizabethan era. So whatever its purpose, we believe it is a building well worth preserving as well as a romantic Landmark.

Once a shell without roof or floors but now restored and majestic

The pavilion belonged to Swarkestone Hall, a great house demolished by 1750. The pavilion survived thanks to the Harpur Crewe family of Calke, but it had long been a shell when we took it on. We re-roofed it and put back floors and windows to recreate the room in which you live and sleep. Glimpse the stars as you flit across the roof to the bathroom in one of the turrets.

Swarkestone, with its important bridge across the Trent, has seen great events: a battle for its control in the Civil War did great damage to the Hall; and in 1745 it was the point at which Bonnie Prince Charlie’s generals convinced him to turn back from his attempt to march on London to seize the English throne. Reluctantly, Charles turned his troops back towards Scotland, where they met their fate at Culloden. The pavilion has even featured, pre-restoration, on the cover of a Rolling Stones album. Today it stands majestic in the Derbyshire countryside as the modern world goes on around it. 

In type it belongs to the same family as the late Elizabethan and Jacobean prodigy houses, reduced to miniature proportions. Fortunately, more information has emerged about the whole of Swarkestone following research in the Harpur-Crewe archive by Dr Howard Colvin and Philip Heath, and this has since been added to by local historians.

A new house (28 hearths in 1662) was built at Swarkestone in the 1560s by Sir Richard Harpur, a lawyer who rose to eminence under the patronage of the Earl of Shrewsbury and by his own marriage to Jane Findern, an heiress. In 1622 the estate was inherited by his son's ten year old grandson, John Harpur. This John formally took up his inheritance in 1630, and was knighted in the same year. At the same time a marriage was arranged for him with Catherine Howard, grand-daughter of the Earl of Suffolk, and step-daughter of William Cavendish. Accounts for 1631-2 record the expenses of `gloves, gauntlets and liveries' at their wedding, and for preparing Swarkestone Hall for their residence.

The arms of this young couple appear on the shields on the front of the Pavilion and it may have been built to celebrate the marriage. Entered in the same set of accounts for 1631-2 is a payment of £111 12s 4d to Richard Shepperd the mason for `New Buildynge', together with a sum for `Boardes' for the `Bowle Alley house'. There seems every reason to identify these entries with the Pavilion and to date it therefore to 1631-2. The Shepperds were well-known masons in the area at the time. Whether Richard Shepperd was also its designer is uncertain: he also built the `Gothic Survival' church at Staunton Harald but little else is known of him, although he describes himself in his will as ‘Architecter’. The Harpur accounts also name a Mr. Woolridge as the Bowl Alley Surveyor, and Mark Girouard has suggested that the Pavilion could be attributed on stylistic grounds to John Smythson. This is credible, given Smythson's service with William Cavendish and Sir John Harpur's marriage with Cavendish's step-daughter, the closest of several links between the two families.

The accounts also help to disperse the bloodthirsty mythology that has grown up around the Pavilion, and establish it as belonging not to the activities of the park but to those of the garden as a pavilion or banqueting house overlooking a bowling green, no doubt as part of a formal garden layout. It is worth noting that in estate papers of the last century it was commonly referred to in these terms, once even as the Bowling Green Pavilion. It may well have doubled as a banqueting house to which small groups could retire to enjoy the ‘banquet’ course of fine wines and sweetmeats, play cards or just enjoy the view of their host’s estate.

The interpretation of the Pavilion's surroundings is confused by the later history of the site. Sir John's branch of the family died with him in 1679. The estate passed to the Harpurs of Calke and the house was dismantled in 1746-8. Surviving high walls containing windows and doors and even a fireplace may reflect its outline at least in part. While an element of picturesque management has been involved in this structure's preservation, as in that of the Pavilion, a symmetry appears to exist between the two, in axis with the old door in the wall opposite. This fits too with a formal layout of gravel paths recorded during ploughing in 1988 in a paddock to the west of the walls; and with a rectangular pond, possibly a canal, which formerly lay to their east. However, in the early 19th century, Swarkestone was the scene of large-scale breeding and sale of livestock. It is possible that some of the walled enclosures, even that in front of the Pavilion, relate equally to this activity.

Although the cupola roofs were carefully repaired in 1844 after one was struck by lightning, the Pavilion fell into dereliction. It acquired some notoriety in 1968 when it was used by the Rolling Stones to promote their album Beggar’s Banquet, and another image from the same photoshoot was used on the back of a later compilation album, Hot Rocks 1964-1971.

The masonry is local gritstone, probably quarried on the estate, and used as rubble for the back and sides but carefully dressed to ashlar for the front elevation. It had mostly weathered well although some careful repointing was needed, using colour-matched lime mortar. The lime render on three sides of the Pavilion was renewed. Some of the window surrounds and sills were so cracked as to need replacing and so sections of new stone from a quarry in the Pennines were inserted.

The cupola roofs were found to have had their profile slightly changed in 1844, having been set back inside the line of the cornice. After some negotiation with English Heritage, who were reluctant to see this early repair lost, we reconstructed the slightly more generous seventeenth-century profile around the 1844 frame, like an onion skin. Permission was gained to transpose the old ball finials from the inner to the outer skin, and the cupolas then recovered with lead. The main roof would also originally have been covered in lead, but as one of the turrets was to become a bathroom, a surface less slippery when wet was necessary and so the new roof is stone paving laid on asphalt on top of a concrete structure. The water drains away between and under the stones.

The cellar, which had been deliberately filled with rubble, and steps were rediscovered and the residue of a lime ash floor was found at first floor level although it was decided that a wooden floor would be more practicable for today’s needs.

Apart from a few old patches of plaster, no trace of the first floor chamber’s decoration remained, even though it is likely that this would originally have been highly ornate. To avoid fakery, a simple heavy cornice moulding was applied to give the room dignity. The staircase had long since disappeared and so the architect has designed a new one in the position of the original, made to a quality to rival anything that the joiners of the 1630s might have produced.