Home Farm Cranmer, Norfolk – History

Home farm was built in 1855 as a Victorian model farm. Little is known about the exact details but the Cranmer Estate and much of Sculthorpe was owned at that time by Sir Willoughby Jones. The house and barns bare all the hallmarks of an Arts and Crafts scheme, although the execution date is a little early. There may be links between Philip Speakman Webb (1831-1915), William Morris’s architect and Home Farm, but the exact nature of the link is unclear. Webb may have worked on the design for the farm whilst working as a pupil of another architect, possibly George Edmund Street where both he and William Morris were among Streets first assistants and working for him in 1855.

Early in 1864 Webb was engaged as architect to carry out his first important enlargement scheme, the project was Cranmer Hall, Sculthorpe. Sir Willoughby Jones(1820-84), a cousin by marriage of Webb’s client, Astley of Melton Constable, asked him to alter and enlarge Cranmer Hall (1711). Webb added a wing and a clock tower; and he rebuilt the stables as red-brick and pantiled block with a round-arched entrance with diagonally braced double doors.

There are many architectural similarities between the farm buildings, the farmhouse and the work carried out at Cranmer Hall. Webb's work at Cranmer Hall is an early instance of a revival in once traditional building methods, typical of the ‘Queen Anne’ style of the period. Rubbed and gauged brickwork had been an important building tradition in Norfolk. Similarities in the earlier design of the Home Farm include brick pilaster detail on each of the farmhouse building facades, gauged brick arches with fine joints and rubbed brick mouldings on the front facade. In the barns, particularly the threshing barn (swimming pool), interesting ironwork on the trusses and massive joinery can be seen and is also a characteristic of the Coach House which Webb designed for Cranmer Hall. Artists and designers of the Pre-Raphaelite movement and the Arts and Crafts group were certainly working locally. The church of St Mary and All Saints in the nearby village of Sculthorpe has stained glass windows by Burne Jones for Morris and Co, Ford Maddox brown and Henry Halliday - depicting two Holman hunt designs.

When Philip Webb undertook to design enlargements or repairs of old dwellings he refused to be hurried. He considered it his duty to advise ‘as to the best way of supporting , repairing and adding to the accommodation of the house with as little injury as possible to its character’ (Philip Webb pioneer of Arts and Crafts Architecture by Sheila Kirk )

I would like to think that we have adopted a similar approach in the sensitive conversion of the farm buildings to holiday cottages and an indoor swimming pool. Although on a limited budget we have recycled original bricks and sourced authentic new brick from an original brick works in Suffolk. We have repaired the brickwork on the threshing barn with lime mortar and replaced missing roofs with natural slate resembling the original Welsh slates that Webb was so fond of. Over the years the farms buildings had been put to an extensive range of uses and had been rather abused with ugly additions and insensitive clumsy repairs. We are a little way off completing our project but Home Farm today is far closer to its original design than it was when we purchased it in 1998.