Crown of Thorne

AN historic house was a symbol of a town in decline, but its restoration is a symbol of new hope. Stephen McClarence talks to the man who is giving it new life. Pictures by Chris Lawton.

It reached the finals of a national competition, but this once-derelict house in an out-on-a-limb Yorkshire market town didn’t win. It was pipped at the post in last year’s Georgian Group Architectural Awards for restoration by... Buckingham Palace.

If there had been an award for gallantry, 42 King Street, a four-bedroomed house next to a furniture showroom on the main road through Thorne, would undoubtedly have won. Its restoration, after all, had been a nightmare for the South Yorkshire Buildings Preservation Trust, a registered charity whose name sums up its aim.

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“The thing that was most challenging,” says Andrew Whitham, the restoration’s project director as he gazes at the redbrick 1740s house, “was that I was familiar with every structural defect – but not all in the same building and all at the same time”.

Most challenging of all was the threat that the entire front of the house was about to collapse shortly after he and his team moved in. Gamely, they ploughed ahead, and the restoration has become a symbol of their broader mission – to help rescue a town in decline.

The context: Thorne is in the far reaches of South Yorkshire, 12 miles or so north east of Doncaster. It has the atmosphere of a frontier town on the edge of the great flatlands that stretch out to the Humber. This is a landscape of canals, dykes and power stations. Its main feature is Thorne Moor, a low-lying tract of peat bog whose mood is better captured by its alternative name: Thorne Waste. In good weather the moor – a site of huge ecological importance – is inspirationally wild; in bad weather, it can seem almost frighteningly bleak. It has been described as “a pagan wilderness”.

The area was fenland until the 17th century, when more than 70,000 acres were drained in a pioneering reclamation project. European migrants settled and Thorne expanded into an important inland port and a centre of shipbuilding. You could sail to the Continent from it, which perhaps accounts for the strikingly Dutch feel of some of its buildings.

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The economy slowed in the 19th century, but was revived with the sinking of a pit. It had no less than four railway stations; it still has two. The colliery closed in 1959 and economic decline set in. The miners moved to other nearby pits, but now those too have closed, along with Darleys Brewery, another major local employer.

Thorne’s heyday already seemed long past when I knew it in the mid 1970s (its Thursday morning court sessions guaranteed stories for the Doncaster newspaper where I was working). Now, for all its busy shopping centre, decades of economic decline have left it looking run-down. The trust describes it as one of the most deprived communities in South Yorkshire. Part of the centre is a conservation area. “English Heritage describes it as ‘at risk’,” says Whitham. “I personally think it’s at a state of crisis. Unless work is done in two or three years there will be significant loss of its historic fabric. I think what’s happened to Thorne is tragic.”

Andrew Whitham is the SYBPT’s Sheffield-based secretary and 42 King Street is one of their major “heritage-led regeneration” projects. The theory goes that reviving a community’s environment can be a catalyst for its economic growth. “We’ve not been so naïve as to think you can turn round a town just by regenerating its architecture, but you can influence people’s perceptions of it,� he says. Signalling the truth of that is the recent formation of a community group to support Thorne’s regeneration.

So far, the restoration has cost £430,000 supported by grants from Doncaster Council, English Heritage and the Architectural Heritage Fund – and there is still work to do. The outside of the house, with its pantile roof and its trim symmetry, may be dazzlingly spruce, but the inside is still waiting to be turned into a home. Or, in fact, homes.

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I find Whitham, the project manager, clearing litter and broken glass from the yard behind the house, built in 1747 but, curiously, unlisted. “I think you can have love affairs with buildings in a kind of way,” he says. “I thought the atmosphere of this house was magical when I first came in. But it was in a shocking state. It had been empty for 20 years and I thought ‘it’s going to disappear off the face of the planet’. And that wasn’t acceptable.”

He balances his laptop on his car bonnet and flicks through photographs of the house’s sad state when the trust bought it for £76,000 in 2005.

“As we started work on the building, the internal walls started moving. We realised it was all going to collapse. Part of the front did. It was sinking by about two millimetres a month, which is quite significant.”

The restorers erected internal scaffolding and concrete piles, sometimes sinking their supports as deep as 20 feet to find stability: the foundations had been built on soggy ground. One of the floors sloped eight inches from one side of the room to the other.

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“The whole building was wringing wet,” says Whitham. “But we always knew it was going to be a long haul. And once you’ve started on a project like this, there’s no turning back.”

They demolished a Victorian shop extension masking part of the original frontage, stripped off the whitewash, and repaired the interior walls and floors, but the house is still effectively a shell and has stood empty since late 2009.

In 2005, the trust was planning to convert it into a three-bedroomed home, with four smaller ones in the rear yard. At the time, Thorne, Whitham points out, was “quite a strong property market”. But the trust overspent, the property market crashed, and now there are plans to convert the house into three flats, plus seven one-bedroom properties.

Whitham delights in its tiniest architectural details and the quality of the restoration. But when he steps back and surveys the house, he says: “At the end of the day, what we want to see is lights in the windows.”