Building record 7749/1/1 - Seawell Grounds Farmhouse & Attached Outbuildings

Seawell Grounds Farm, Blakesley. Model farm for the 4th Duke of Grafton 1839-44. Model farms were architect-designed farmsteads inspired by the ideals of Enlightenment that combined utility with architectural beauty.

Farmhouse. C.1840, altered in C20 renovation. Coursed squared ironstone, hipped slate roofs, stone ridge and internal stacks. 2-storey, 3-window central block with lower 2-storey, 2-window wings either side. Central double-leaf, part-glazed, door with panelled reveals and limestone porch with square columns supporting plain frieze and cornice. 12-pane sash windows to ground and first floors with flat-arched heads. Plinth, storey band and deep overhanging eaves. Porch widened and rebuilt C20 and right ground floor window of left wing has had sill dropped and made into garden door. Symmetrical composition completed by single-storey outbuilding wings, each with 4 blank round-headed arches with imposts. That to left housed cart-shed open to yard to rear, now garaging. That to right is joined to extensive, altered range of farm buildings on three sides of yard to rear. Interior has stone-flagged floors and some original stone chimneypieces. Square pillars of porch originally circular, unfluted Doric columns; changed in C20 alterations. One of a number of model farms built for the 4th Duke of Grafton 1839-44. (Buildings of England: Northamptonshire, p.107; The Northamptonshire Landscape, J. Steane, 1974, p.240-1).

{4} Undated photo;

{6} Northamptonshire (63 examples recorded to date, gazetteer in NMR, Swindon).
Northamptonshire was a county dominated by large estates. Nearly a third of the area was in estates of over 10,000 acres and there were 38 owners of more than 3,000 acres in 1871. However, according to Caird, ‘many of them have no interest in their farms beyond the annual rent they receive, know nothing of the management of land themselves and do not employ an agent who does.’ As a result ‘their tenants, from deficient buildings and want of drainage are incapacitated from doing justice to their farms’. There were of course exceptions to this general picture. The Spencers of Althorpe were well known for their interest in improvements, the third Earl Spencer being the first President of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. The Duke of Grafton was also influential, and in the 1830s erected well-planned sets of buildings on several of his farms.
The main responsibility of the agent was to see that his employer’s estate produced a profit. This could mean that he might try to keep some of the owner’s more extravagant ideas in check, and here they could be in conflict with the architects whose grandiose schemes might well appear attractive to their patrons. The existence of pattern books meant that many agents, such as John Gardner, working for the Duke of Grafton, were able to adapt published plans to their own purposes. The plain classical steadings around the family seat in Northamptonshire are examples of well-proportioned, functional designs which could have provided very adequately for the requirements of their farms. Many of the designs published by the engineer and inspector to the Land Improvement Companies, John Bailey Denton, in his beautifully illustrated book, The Farm Homesteads of England, published in 1863, were the work of agents rather than architects.
William Bearne, writing in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society of England in 1852, commented on the generally bad state of farm buildings in Northamptonshire. However, he noted a few exceptions, the most obvious of which were those of the Grafton Estate in the parishes of Stoke Bruerne, Foscote, Abthorpe, Shutlanger, Blisworth, Greens Norton and Silverstone. Here the Duke of Grafton had ‘some years ago, remodelled some parts of his estate and erected a considerable quantity of new buildings’. About £20,000 was spent on improvements between 1840 and 1848 under the directions of John Gardner, who designed the buildings himself. The planning and design of these farmsteads, dating from the very beginning of the Victorian era, hark back to the Georgian period. Here, as elsewhere, the traditional E- and U-plan closely link to substantial farmhouses on the fourth side of the yard continued to be the most usual farm layout. The original plans show shelter sheds arranged around large courts, designed to be divided into separate feeding yards. Gardner made no provision for mechanised threshing, although one of the larger farmsteads included a barn at right-angles to the rear shelter sheds, extending into a stack yard allowing for a power source to be drawn alongside. In spite of these, and other well-publicised examples of improvements, much still remained to be done in the 1860s with writers such as Copland being outspoken in their criticism of landlords who refused to provide the necessary capital investment.

{7} John Gardner persuaded the 4th duke, a few years before his death in 1844, to institute a vigorous policy of rebuilding farmsteads throughout the estate. In some cases obsolete farm buildings were replaced with imposing quadrangles of barns, stables and cattle-sheds, built of coursed rubble limestone with slate or tile roofs, without the farmhouse itself being rebuilt. Elsewhere the houses were replaced with substantial four-square late Georgian buildings, again of coursed limestone (perhaps with ironstone quoins and dressings to the doors and windows), usually beneath a hipped slate roof. Where only the buildings were replaced, and in some cases where a new house was also erected, these 'model farms' (as they have come to be called, although the term is not found in contemporary estate papers) stood on the village street, flanked by older farmhouses and cottages. In some parishes, however, the new farmsteads were established outside the village on former common-field land that had been consolidated into larger holdings as a result of inclosure over the previous halfcentury.

<1> Clews Architects, 1980s, Database for Listing of Historic Buildings of Special Architectural Interest: Northamptonshire, 2/29 (Digital archive). SNN102353.

<2> List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest ("Greenback"), F08 (unchecked) (Catalogue). SNN45262.

<3> Pevsner N.; Cherry B., 1973, The Buildings of England: Northamptonshire, (unchecked) (Series). SNN1320.

<4> Photographs of buildings in Blakesley (Photographs). SNN112037.

<5> Bond A., 1995, Thematic Survey of Planned and Model Farms: Northamptonshire, (unchecked) (Gazetteer). SNN63075.

<6> Wade Martins S., 2002, The English Model Farm: Building the Agricultural Ideal, 1700 -1914, p.19+118-9+216 (part checked) (Book). SNN102219.

<7> Riden P.; Insley C., 2002, The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Northamptonshire, p. 18-37 (Series). SNN102540.

Record last edited

Jan 18 2024 4:03PM