Monument record 6002/1 - Hunsbury Hill Farm

Property now used as Community Centre.

A rare survival of an early 'model farm' – a farm which has been designed and built in a single phase, and exemplifies best practice for its day. Model farms were a vast improvement on anything built earlier in terms of convenience and efficiency and represent advanced thinking in architectural as well as agricultural terms.

The farm was built around 1770 with the farmhouse and farm buildings set around an octagonal courtyard. It is unusual and remarkable because the layout of the buildings has remained almost unchanged from 1700 to the present day. No other similar farmstead from the county is known.

The farm was built by Edward Bouverie of Delapre and subsequently owned by Pickering Phipps, the Northampton brewer, who was also chairman of the Hunsbury ironworks. Farming was interrupted for the last quarter of the 19th century when the land was given over to ironstone quarrying and the house let separately. The land was returned to agricultural use, predominantly as a sheep farm in the beginning of the 20th century. In 1935 the farm passed into the ownership of a number of companies intending to further exploit the ironstone deposits, though they never did so. In the 1970s, 200 years of farming of Hunsbury Hill ended.

<1> Conlon R., 2005, Hunsbury Hill Centre, Northampton: Historical Report, (checked) (Report). SNN105421.

<2> Northamptonshire Industrial Archaeology Group, 1996-2013, Northamptonshire Industrial Archaeology Group Newsletter, Issue 103 Summer 07 (checked) (Newsletter). SNN55360.

Record last edited

Nov 3 2010 3:24PM