Stately home set to become year-round attraction after expansion backed

Sledmere Estate wants to convert a complex of 180-year-old farm buildings on the estate which serves Sledmere House to provide a range of new facilities, including a larger art gallery, café, restaurant, garden centre and farm shop.

As part of the plans, walled paddocks at Home Farm will be converted into parking and a former barn and kennels into a tourist office and bicycle hire point. Other buildings will be converted to create more space for the Triton Gallery and the former estate sawmill will be converted to a garden centre.

The Grade I listed Georgian country house, set within a park landscaped by Capability Brown in 1777, is in a village where the last houses were built in the 1950s and parish councillors had been worried about urbanising the main road, with signs and a zebra crossing outside the main entrance to Sledmere House on the “highly scenic” B1253.

Councillors meeting in Beverley yesterday were told the plans had been carefully thought out and would help Sledmere House, which opens from the end of March to the end of October, become a year-round attraction. The development is set to create eight full-time jobs in the first phase.

The plans will now go to the Secretary of State for a final decision.