Moggerhanger House
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Moggerhanger House is a Grade I listed country house in Moggerhanger, Bedfordshire, England, designed by the eminent architect John Soane. The house is owned by a Christian charity, Harvest Vision, and the Moggerhanger House Preservation Trust, and has recently undergone a £6m refurbishment project with help from organisations such as the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and the East of England Development Agency.
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[edit] History
Originally Moggerhanger had been a small Georgian house. It was acquired by Godfrey Thornton, a Bank of England director, who commissioned the Bank’s architect John Soane to remodel it between 1790 and 1793. More substantial work would follow when Thornton's son Stephen inherited the house. Soane continued from 1806 until the scheme was completed in 1812 while the Bank of England reconstruction was under way. Soane remodelled Moggerhanger entirely, enlarging it to the west, relocating the entrance to the north and reproofing the house completely. He incorporated his previous work from 1793 maintaining symmetries and Classical axes. Soane experimented with decoration using it as a prototype for the future work. As most of this is now lost the recent restoration of Moggerhanger House put it forward as Soane’s design of tremendous significance.[vague]
The house was rendered by Soane using ‘Parker’s Roman Cement’ of biscuit-brown colour. This was a new material, patented hydraulic lime render, of his time. The garden side of seven bays has a wooden veranda. In the centre is a shallow pediment on pilaster strips with sunk panels. The entrance has a low centre with a semicircular porch of Greek Doric columns of the Delos type. The end bays have on the ground floor arched windows with broad Grecian pediment over. Behind the porch is a square entrance hall once with a shallow dome. The window bars are painted dark grey, which causes the window detail to disappear so that pure shapes of openings are clearly visible appearing like punch recesses. Inside there is an all-cantilevered staircase with simple iron balustrade.
The house was used as a hospital for most of the twentieth century. In 1919 it was opened as a TB isolation hospital, and then became an orthopaedic hospital in the late 1950s. In 1960 it was renamed Park Hospital, but closed in 1987 when a new wing was built in Bedford hospital. From that point the house went into a state of disrepair, until 1995 when work on its restoration began. The restoration project took ten years to complete, and members of the local village and local churches volunteered help and support in order to complete the work and maintain the site whilst building contractors were working.
[edit] The present
The house is now used as a conference and training centre for most of the year, but opens as a tourist attraction from mid-June to mid-September, during which time public tours are conducted twice daily.
Free access to the grounds is available throughout the year, and tea rooms and a restaurant are open daily from 11am to 4pm serving refreshments and light lunches. The house has become a centre of local community activities and its successful restoration has been a triumph for the local village and for Bedfordshire.
The Moggerhanger House Preservation Trust is currently trying to secure funds to restore Humphrey Repton’s 33-acre parkland surrounding the house.
