Monument record 5096/1 - C18th/C19th Kingsthorpe White Freestone Quarry (William Boswell)

Quarry located alongside the harborough Road, about where Chalcombe Avenue is now located. Supplied stone in the 18th and 19th centuries. Kilns also present here

{1} Documentary references to undated kilns; found in an area off Boughton Road now Chalcombe Avenue; SP752640.

{2} The quarry in Kingsthorpe White Freestone, a sandstone above the Northampton Sand, mapped as 'Lower Estuarine' but probably part of the Rutland Formation.
In the 18th century a new stone was introduced into Northamptonshire architecture, and remained popular for about 100 years. It was a white or pale grey sandstone that came from a quarry on the north side of Kingsthorpe. This building stone is not known to occur anywhere else, and the ‘celebrated’ stone has now become a rarity.
The stone may first have been quarried in the 1760s when it was used by William Wentworth of Boughton Hall to build an obelisk, sometime after 1764. The quarry does not appear on the Kingsthorpe Enclosure Award map of 1767, but by 1773 William Boswell was supplying white sandstone from here for Kingsthorpe Hall. In 1793 Benjamin Drayton, then owner of the Kingsthorpe quarry, gave £1,000 worth of white sandstone for the new Infirmary in Northampton. Between 1823-30 the historian George Baker observed that ‘to the east of Harborough Road is a quarry of White Freestone of a sandy texture with a remarkably fine grit and a tendency to harden on exposure to the air’. The quarry still existed, but apparently was no longer working when it was described by Samuel Sharp (1870). It is shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1886, situated beside the Harborough Road, about where Chalcombe Avenue now is (SP751641).

<1> Northampton Museum Records, 1804 (Plan) (checked) (Uncertain). SNN126.

<2> Sutherland D.S., 2003, Northamptonshire Stone, p.58 Fig 6.3 + p.66-70 (checked) (Book). SNN104515.

<3> Ordnance Survey, 1880s, First Edition Ordnance Survey 25 Inch Mapping Series (45.01), (checked) (Map). SNN71442.

<4> SMR CARDS, (unchecked) (Notes). SNN2730.

Record last edited

Jan 19 2018 10:19AM