Building record 15749 - St Thomas's Vicarage

<1> Historic England, 2011, The National Heritage List for England, 1329771 (Web Site). SCH6528.

St Thomas's Vicarage, Walton New Road, Stockton Heath
Grade II Listed vicarage, probably 1838. Rendered brick walls (lined to imitate stonework); hipped slate roof of low pitch with wide boxed eaves, lead rolls and 2 matching rendered chimneys; symmetrical, of 2 storeys and 3 windows with square-piered prostyle portico and simplified entablature. Windows to front and right end are cross-casements with margin panes; parlour has a large canted bay in left end with flight of 4 stone steps to the garden. Small pane sashes to kitchen in left end and to a bedroom at rear. Double half-glazed doors with margin panes.

Interior: Open string stair with swept mahogany handrail and square balusters. 4 panel doors.

The Vicarage is a good pattern-book example of its period; the church for which it was built was consecrated in 1838.

<2> Peter de Figueiredo (Independent Consultant), 2010, The Vicarage, Stockton Heath, Cheshire: PPG 15 Statement, R4652 (Client Report). SCH9320.

St Thomas’s vicarage was constructed as a domestic villa by the Greenall family in the 1820s and given to the parish to serve as the Parsonage House in 1838. It is an attractive Regency villa designed to a pattern book style with scored stucco facades and a shallow pitched hipped roof. The plan form remains largely intact, though it appears that a rear servants’ wing was removed in the middle of the 19th century and replaced over time by a collection of outbuildings contained by a courtyard. It is situated on Walton Road in a generous plot with mature trees. The property remained in use as the vicarage until 2009 when it was sold.

The earliest map to show the vicarage is the Tithe map of 1851, plot 74. This shows the main block with a sizeable wing at the rear and a small courtyard. The first OS map, dated 1877, shows the property in its garden setting, with a driveway leading up to the house. By this time the rear wing had been replaced by a group of outbuildings around a courtyard. A small recess is shown in the back wall of the house instead of the existing WC extension. A further outbuilding lies to the east of the courtyard. The 1911 OS map shows little change, but by 1987 a single house had been built on the garden plot on the east side, and the land to the rear had been developed for housing.

No architect is recorded and it is likely that the building was developed from a contemporary pattern book. It takes the form of a simple rectangle with four rooms per floor arranged around a central entrance and staircase hall. The external walls are stuccoed and scored in imitation of ashlar, and the roof is hipped with shallow pitches and overhanging eaves. Significant external features are the portico and entrance doorway, the casement windows with margin lights, the bay window, roof details and chimney stacks. The rear elevation is of lower significance, as it has been substantially altered. Being later in date and much altered, the outbuildings and courtyard walls are also of lower significance. Significant internal features are the layout of the house and the room proportions which remain largely unaltered, the staircase, the plaster mouldings, skirtings, doors and doorcases, and built-in cupboards. The one surviving fireplace surround on the ground floor and the lesser fireplaces on the first floor are also of value.