Beechwood Estate: Georgian mansion in Yorkshire that was the family seat of Catherine, Princess of Wales' great-grandmother goes on the market

Beechwood House is part of an estate in Roundhay dating back to 1820 which was purchased by Francis Lupton in 1860 and remained in the family’s hands until 1998. It has since been converted into offices, and the Grade II-listed building is now on the market for £775,000. It was originally surrounded by farmland, most of which was sold off in the 1950s for the building of council housing at Seacroft.

The Luptons owned textile mills in Leeds and several generations of the family were highly involved in civic life and charitable causes. Frank’s grand-daughter, Olive, married solicitor Richard Noel Middleton, and they became the great-grandparents of Catherine, the current Princess of Wales.

In 2018 Catherine, then Duchess of Cambridge, visited the Imperial War Museum to learn about the fates of her great-uncles, Olive’s three brothers Maurice, Lionel and Francis, who were all killed in World War One. Among the museum’s collection is a telegram Olive sent to her husband, who was also fighting in France, informing him of Francis’s death. At the time, she was volunteering as a nurse at Gledhow Hall, then a military hospital in Chapel Allerton. It was their younger son Peter, a World War Two flying ace, who became the father of Michael Middleton, the Princess’ father.

Various branches of the Lupton family owned the adjacent Potternewton and Newton Hall estates, later sold for housebuilding in Chapeltown, and Olive was born at Newton Grove. She, her three brothers and a sister grew up in a house on the estate called Rockland. After the deaths of his sons, their father moved to Roundhay with his unmarried daughter Anne, but survived only until 1921.

Beechwood ended up in a different line of the family, though Olive often visited her grandparents and cousins there. She and her husband lived at a property in Roundhay called Fieldhead until her death in 1936. She was a wealthy woman, having inherited the trust funds initially intended for her brothers.

Francis, Olive’s grandfather, and his wife Frances, a campaigner for women’s education, lived at Potternewton Hall from 1847, and in 1870 he and his brother Darnton had been given the Newton Hall estate from their other brother, Arthur, choosing to develop the land as the Newton Park housing estate. By this time, they had moved to Beechwood. They had four sons – Frank, Olive’s father; Arthur, Charles and Hugh. By 1891, Francis had died but his widow remained at Beechwood with her servants and staff, who all lived in cottages on the estate.

Frank joined the family mills, expanding the business and moving it from Leeds to Pudsey. In 1880, he married vicar’s daughter Harriet Davis, who died in 1892 in a flu epidemic, the same year his mother Frances passed away at Beechwood. After the deaths of his sons in the war, he abandoned Rockland, where his children had been raised, and it became a home for orphans.

Beechwood then seems to have passed down the line of Frank’s brother Arthur, a widower who moved there in 1920 from his home, Springwood, also in Roundhay. His daughters, Elinor and Elizabeth, ended up living and running a rare breed goat farm there after the deaths of their father in 1930 and their brother in a riding accident in 1929. They regularly opened their gardens to the public during the 1940s and 50s, and remained there until their deaths in the late 1970s, before which they had placed a protective covenant on Asket Hill, part of the estate that they wished to be preserved for nature. Their cousin Olive’s unmarried sister, Anne, also lived with them at the estate. The family textiles business was sold in the 1950s.

Beechwood later became a college for the co-operative movement and then offices, and the great-nephews and niece of Elinor and Elizabeth still own some of the estate today. The other Lupton properties, Potternewton Hall and Newton Hall, were demolished between the 1920s and 1950s. Rockland survives and is used as a health centre by the NHS, while the Newton Hall entrance lodge also remains.

Olive’s marital home, Fieldhead, where the Princess’ grandfather Peter Middleton was born in 1920, has now been converted into flats. Peter married her grandmother at St John the Baptist Church in Adel in 1946, and there are Lupton graves in St John’s Church in Roundhay.

Agents WSB Property Agents are selling Beechwood House.