Историческая резиденция промышленника выставлена на продажу с ценой до 1,5 млн фунтов

Newham Hall, probably the last surviving intact Middlesbrough ironmaster’s mansion, has gone on the market with a guide price of up to £1.5m. Set in its own parkland between Coulby Newham and Stokesley, it is a fabulous-looking property that has been faithfully kept as ironmaster John Mills last saw it when he died 110 years ago. But the most striking line in the estate agent’s brochure says: “The Hall is attributed to the architectural work of GG Hoskins.” Hoskins is Darlington’s greatest architect, his late 19th Century Gothic fantastic buildings once earning the town the nickname of “the Athens of the North”. They include the King’s Head Hotel, the sixth form college, the library, the Northgate technical college and many of the mansions and banks for miles around. His biggest project was Middlesbrough Town Hall; one of his most successful was the Fleece Hotel in Richmond; his least successful was the Victoria Hall theatre in Sunderland in which 183 children were crushed to death in a stampede in 1883. We’d never seen Newham Hall listed as a Hoskins before, and all descriptions of it say that “no architect or designer has been identified” for it. All but one. The agents, Robin Jessop and GSC Grays, pointed us to Nikolaus Pevsner’s North Riding volume. Between 1951 and 1974, Pevsner toured the country writing notes about every historic building he could lay his eyes on. He is to architectural history what Harry Kane is to goalscoring. He is unarguable. And he says of Newham Hall: “Perhaps by GG Hoskins; it is strikingly similar to his Elm Ridge.” Elm Ridge is now a Methodist church in Darlington, built in the late 1860s by Hoskins for John Pease, the eldest son of Edward “Father of the Railways” Pease. Newham Hall was built in 1880-81 for John “Jack” Mills who, with the Swedish engineer Johan Gjers, had founded Gjers, Mills & Company in 1870 with their Ayresome Ironworks backing onto the Tees. Mills bought the 400-acre Newham estate in 1874 so he could be near his ironworks but also in the countryside so he could indulge his interest in agriculture – one of his first works was a model farm, which still stands beside Middlesbrough Golf Course. The estate featured a 17th Century moated manor house which he demolished, although he turned the moat into a pond, and he had Hoskins – or someone – create the Jacobethan style mansion and lay out the parkland, complete with a series of ponds to provide the water supply. Mills, whose coat-of-arms is in the stonework, moved in in 1881 but in 1882, his wife died followed in the next two years by his two daughters. Although he lived until 1916, his appetite for developing the estate was diminished and so it survives practically as he and Hoskins (or whoever) initially planned it. In 1952, having been uninhabited for a decade or more, the Mills family sold it to Ridsdale & Co and the Bureau of Analysed Samples, which turned the hall into laboratories for their metallurgical and industrial analysis. They seem to have treasured the hall and its parklands, conserving the property and fighting off developers who wanted to build on its land. Now it is for sale for residential or commercial use, a hotel or a carehome being mooted. Is it a Hoskins? Who are we to disagree with Pevsner? - Newham Hall is being jointly marketed by GSC Grays and Robin Jessop. For more information, contact GSC Grays on 01748-829217 or visit gscgrays.co.uk.