yorkshire historic houses guide

A 17th-century brick facade conceals a Norman undercroft and 15th-century Great Hall, part of the original manor house at Burton Agnes. Sitting outside the formal walls of Burton Agnes Hall, the manor house pre-dates that house by four centuries. 

The building was the Great Hall of the original Griffith manor, and was built by the present family'S predecessor, Roger de Stuteville, in about 1173. Presumably respect for ancestors protected it down the years; it is now guarded by English Heritage. Even its conversion for use as a Georgian laundry was deferential. The entrance leads into the undercroft. This is exceptionally grand and well preserved. The massive piers have waterleaf capitals and the vaults are heavily ribbed. Upstairs is the hall itself, much altered but still with an appropriate sense of majesty. The roof has a kingpost and dates from the 15th century. Original fragments can be detected in the walling and a small slit window survives, lighting the staircase.

A magnificent Georgian town house, saved from potential ruin during the 1980s. The interiors are decorated with virtuoso stucco work.

Those who lament the loss of so many fine English town houses can take comfort from Fairfax House. All but a ruin in the 1920s, the building was used variously as a dance hall and a foyer and cloakroom to an adjacent cinema. It is now again among the finest Georgian survivals in England. Begun c1745 and fitted out for Viscount Fairfax cI755-62, it was created from the wealth of land and restored from the wealth of chocolate.

The interior is the masterpiece of Carr of York, but it is also a masterpiece of restoration by Francis Johnson for the York Civic Trust in 1982-84. The rooms hold the Noel Terry collection of furniture, clocks and porcelain. They seem cold, watched over by spectral attendants, but that is a small price to pay for a feast. The facade onto Castlegate is of five bays with a central pediment, the doorcase a handsome Doric. The interior of the ground floor survived years of abuse when there was a public dance hall and leaking lavatories above. Almost all the stucco is contemporary with the house and is English Rococo. The furniture is Georgian.

The hall and staircase are a crescendo of Joseph Cortese's plasterwork, creating a maximum of impact inside a minimum of space. The stair rises to a Venetian window crowned with the Fairfax arms, returning to a landing flanked by magnificent Corinthian doorcases. Walls and ceiling are encrusted with Cortese's stuccowork. Palms and swags support busts of Newton and Shakespeare. The deeply coved ceiling is militaristic, with weapons, trophies, flags and putti holding a light for the 'true religion', Fairfax being a Roman Catholic. Two superb rooms grace the first floor, the drawing room and the saloon. The drawing room ceiling has fronds embracing a depiction of Friendship. The walls are hung with green damask. The saloon plasterwork is the finest in the house. The foliage seems in perpetual motion, swirling across the ceiling towards a frieze of lions and leaves. The Viscount's bedroom across the passage was rescued from use as a cinema lavatory.

The bed is a four-poster designed by Francis Johnson himself. On it is laid a fine silk dressing-gown with velvet cuffs, together with a rosary and book of poems. Fairfax's daughter Anne's bedroom has vivid wallpaper in what is known as a Mock India pattern. A painting over the fireplace depicts her as a shepherdess. The kitchen downstairs shows preparation for the Viscount's dinner on 15 April 1763. He ate well. The present entrance to Fairfax House is through an adjacent building. This is a pity since it denies proper access by the front door.

A Georgian house that belonged to wool merchants and manufacturers, the Taylor family. In the 1830s a Mary Taylor became a close friend of Charlotte Bronte.

This is a cloth merchant's house of the 'middling' sort. It was built by and for the Taylor family in the 1660s and owned by them until 1920. In the 1830s, one of Joshua Taylor's six children, Mary, became a close friend of Charlotte Bronte from Haworth. Bronte featured the family and house in her novel, Shiriey, as she did Oakwell Hall. It is from this association that the building draws much of its celebrity. The house sits by the main road, and is called Red for the unusual colour of its brick construction.

The outside is Georgian, as is much of the interior, although the latter suffers severely from museumitis. The rooms are all pretty-genteel. The Hall is painted to look like stone, the pine wood grained to resemble mahogany and the arches 'marbled'. Stained-glass heads of Milton and Shakespeare adorn the dining room. It is as described by Bronte, 'no splendour but taste everywhere. Waxwork figures portray the Taylors at work and play. The women paint watercolours, the children are tutored. Other tableaux in the house show the servants in the kitchens, well equipped with original implements.

The house was begun in the late 16th century and extended in the early 17th. The facade features heavily mullioned windows in an unusual arrangement.

The setting of Holdsworth House must once have been sublime, in its private cleft in the moors. It now stands in a grimy valley, full of the scars and shedlands north of Halifax. But the exterior is a fine display of Yorkshire Jacobean, built c1598 and extended in the early 17th century. The porch is dated 1633. The formal entrance is through noble gateposts into a knot garden. An original gazebo is in one corner and muscular stone walls flank the sides. The main facade is extraordinary, crowded with thick-mullioned windows. This is well-set, virile Yorkshire.

The porch has to its right two gabled bays, one with a cross of St John indicating past Crusader activity on someone's part. The lower hall window has eleven lights, asymmetrically arranged. The left wing has a two-tier window composition, again with a wide gable. It is all most assertive. Older byres and barns extend behind. The interior is much altered but contains Jacobean furnishings, beams and fireplaces. The house was acquired by the Pearson family in 1963 and turned into a country club for dining and gambling.

In 1964 it achieved immortality as the venue for John Lennon's twenty-fourth birthday party. Guests can still sleep in beds in which the Beatles are alleged to have slept that night, forced to sleep two to a room. The hotel literature boasts also that 'Iayne Mansfield and Sir Alec Douglas-Home slept here'. 

An 18th-century palace, built by Carr of York with magnificent interiors by Robert Adam. Sir Charles Barry made alterations to parts of Harewood in the 19th century.

A simple Georgian house in a moorside village, now maintained as a museum to the Bronte sisters, Charlotte, Emily and Anne.

A Georgian town house with plain, Palladian style exterior, featuring an Ionic stone doorway. Inside, a grand stone staircase is decorated with stucco work and finished with wrought-iron bannisters.

A brick-built, grand merchant's house, built in the 17th century in a style known as Artisan Mannerist. Some additions were made to the interior during later centuries

A picturesque one-off, built during the 18th century into a cleft in the cliffside of a river gorge. Crenellation turned the house into a fort-like structure.

A 15th-century house; the ground floor is stone, the structure above is half timbered. The building was extended in the 17th century. It is now a museum.

The original house was built in the late 18th century, but a fire in 1911 destroyed all but the outer walls. The Georgian interiors, mainly by Joseph Rose,were fully restored.

A Georgian town house, once the home of Alf Wig ht, creator of James Herriot. The rooms have been restored to their 1950s furnishings and decor.

A Jacobean house built on the site of earlier residences. Restored in the Edwardian era by Frank Greene to his taste and ideas.

Remains of a splendid banqueting house built in the 1670s. Now modernized and used as the visitor centre for Whitby Abbey.