Building record 1255/1/3 - Stables at Toft Hall

<1> English Heritage, 2005, List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest, 1329783 (Digital Archive). SCH4666.

Stable block. Late C18. Red English garden wall bond brick work with slate roof and timber and lead clock turret and bell-cote. Two storeys, L-shaped plan. Courtyard frontage: L-shaped with two wings forming a roughly symmetrical facade the central feature of which is placed in the angle cutting across it at 45°. This has a cambered arch to the ground floor. Within is a cambered window of 3 x 2 sash panes and a cambered headed door to the left with hinge dressings. First floor window of 3 x 2 sash panes with cambered head. Stone parapet above with gutter holes to sides. Octagonal clock turret to roof with leaded sides and octagonal domed bell cote above which has wooden pillars and railings of x-pattern. To each side of this central feature are ranges of 4 bays, those two nearest the centre each having two ground floor windows of 3 x 4 sash panes with cambered heads and oval windows to first floor with stone surrounds and cross-pattern glazing. Each side then projects slightly, that to right having a cambered headed stable door with stone hinge dressings to left and an undivided similar doorway to right. Blind first floor stone window sill to left and 3 x 2 pane sash window in similar surround to right. The left hand side has a similar arrangement of doors reversed and they are here placed closer together allowing for a ground floor window of 3 x 4 sash panes with cambered head to the left. First floor window of 3 x 2 lights at left and loft doorway with stone sill to right. To left of left hand side and slightly recessed are four further bays with stone surrounded oval openings to first floor, the lateral ones blocked. Two cambered headed central doorways to ground floor with sash windows of 3 x 2 panes to either side. To the right of the right hand block and slightly recessed are three bays with lateral oval openings at first floor level, the left hand one blocked, the right hand one with cross-pattern glazing and a loft door to the centre. Five C20 openings to ground floor under iron girder, the three openings to left have double doors, the two to right now infilled with brick and having C20 windows of 3 x 4 panes. Further single storey C20 addition to right.

<2> Garry Miller: Architectural Historian, 2019, Proposed Conversion of Stables at Toft Hall, Toft, Cheshire: Preliminary Heritage Assessment, R4309 (Client Report). SCH8694.

A heritage assessment, including photographic survey, was produced in 2019 for the stables at Toft Hall prior to proposed re-development. Their significance is primarily embodied in the external appearance of the two ranges, whose scale and appearance denote the high status of the building and the horses and carriages they accommodated. The interior of the buildings have been subject to some change although still retain cast iron stalls and kingpost trusses.The outrigger, a late nineteenth century addition, is secondary in terms of its importance owing to its later date and lower level of interest. However, a shed attached to the outrigger is notable for its reuse of a timber-frame roof truss within, and as the survivor of a piecemeal further range of buildings that stood here until at least the late 1960s. The buildings stand within a farmyard context, shared with large barns of eighteenth/early nineteenth century date across a courtyard to the west, along with modern outbuildings beyond. The significance of the stable block is enhanced by its group value and setting in relation to the hall and the other traditional farm buildings of the site.

The Toft estate was acquired by marriage by the Leycester family in the late fourteenth century and remained with them until the early twentieth century. The hall itself was rebuilt in the late seventeenth century and extensively renovated between 1810 and 1813 by Ralph Leycester (1763–1835), MP for Shaftesbury. The work was undertaken by London architect Samuel Cockerell. Given the late eighteenth century date of the stables, they may also have been built for Ralph Leycester.

Historic mapping shows the present stables structure is the survivor of what was originally a larger group of buildings. The stables are depicted on the Tithe map of 1848 as having a secondary range parallel to the rear of the southeast range. This was linear in form and of piecemeal appearance. This range appears to have been partly dismantled by the time of the 1877 25 inch OS map, and by the 1898 map, had been partly replaced by the present outrigger. The remnants of the piecemeal range still survived in 1967 (1:2500 OS map).