Southwick Hall

Now run by a family charitable trust focusing on art and education, Southwick will reopen soon with opportunities for events, exhibitions especially for local artists, and those focusing on Victorian and Edwardian heritage, and a venue for book clubs. In due course Southwick will have a new tearoom, rehearsal spaces and opportunities not only for filming and photo shoots but also volunteering. For further information please contact Fabio Perselli.

Nestled in a valley beneath Rockingham Forest, lies the village of Southwick with the church of St Mary’s, and Southwick Hall close by. The Hall, with its towers and finials and gables, represents many centuries of building unified by the use of the local limestone and collyweston roof tiles; there are two medieval towers, an Elizabethan hall and crosswing built on the site of the earlier ...hall, with Georgian additions, and a Victorian stable block and east wing. Three families have owned the Hall; from the twelfth century the Knyvets. Richard Knyvet, a wealthy wool merchant of the early fourteenth century, built the south tower block at the front of the Hall and his son Sir John Knvyet was Lord Chancellor to Edward 111. They sold in the 1440’s to the Lynne’s, a merchant family from London; George Lynne who rebuilt the main hall and cross wing in the 1580’s, was a member of Parliament for Stamford at the time of the incarceration and execution of Mary Queen of Scots at nearby Fotheringhay. After years of neglect in the 1800’s the Hall was sold to the Capron family in the 1840’s; George Capron was a wealthy lawyer from London whose clients included the likes of the third Marquis of Hertford, the original for the Marquis of Steyne in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. George Capron had been born in Northampton and built a substantial land holding in the county; he had restored Southwick Hall by 1848, adding a stable block and home farm.