James Thornhill’s mural in the staircase hall at Sherborne House has been restored
Samuel Kennedy
Placing buckets under leaks from the failing roof was one of the major chores for volunteers after Sherborne House, a Grade I listed Georgian mansion in the heart of the Dorset town of the same name, closed almost 20 years ago as a much-loved arts centre. In heavy rain the task was beyond them; water ran down the surface of Sherborne’s most spectacular work of art, a 1720s mural by James Thornhill, which covers the entire staircase hall and ceiling with figures from Greek mythology.
Propped with scaffolding and patched with tarpaulin, the house was on the national register of important buildings at risk, but both a heritage lottery bid and the hope of winning the BBC’s Restoration series had failed. The local authority, which had owned it since 1931, concluded that restoration was unaffordable, and despite a public petition voted in 2007 to sell. It was bought by a property developer for a reported £3m. This seemed to mark the end of public access to Sherborne House.
But there has been a surprising twist in the tale. After having been restored from cellar to garret, rewired, replumbed, kitted out with all manner of tech, a bar, a restaurant and a spectacular glass-and-timber events pavilion in the back garden to pay for its keep, the house was reopened last month as The Sherborne, an admission-free arts centre and visitor attraction.
The house had a patchy history from the start. It was designed in 1720, probably by the splendidly named Dorset architect Benjamin Bastard, for the politician and landowner Henry Seymour Portman. Perched on a hill above the town centre, it looked magnificent viewed from below, but the back was always a jumble of the new and earlier Tudor and medieval buildings. Portman died in 1728, and probably never saw either the completed house or the spectacular mural he commissioned from Thornhill, best known for his London work, including the Painted Hall in the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich and the cupola of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
The house passed through a procession of tenants—which helped preserve it from alterations as fashions changed—for most of the next two centuries. Among them was the celebrated actor William Macready, who in 1854 invited Charles Dickens to give a public reading in aid of the Sherborne Literary and Scientific Institution. To Macready’s fury, tickets sold poorly at five shillings—“A crown, what is it? The cost of a bottle of bad wine swallowed at a public dinner,” he raged—but after a last-minute price cut, the room was recorded as “crammed and suffocating” while Dickens read from A Christmas Carol and other works for almost three hours.
For much of the 20th century the house became the Lord Digby School for Girls—past pupils recall augmenting the anatomy of Thornhill’s naked cherubic figures with blobs of chewing gum—before becoming an arts centre, which hosted many popular exhibitions despite the increasingly fragile state of the building.
In 2006 Michael Cannon, a West Country entrepreneur and art lover who made his fortune through pub and brewery interests, and lived near Sherborne with his wife, Sally, considered buying the house. But the couple decided restoration was beyond them; having bought and restored scores of Victorian pubs, Cannon was well aware of both the cost and the problems of such a complex building in such poor condition. However, in 2018 the property developers, having built housing towards the back of the land and added a concrete service stair to the house itself, decided to sell the mansion. The Cannons came back for another look, bought it and established the Sherborne House Trust. Cannon brought in Stefan Pitman of Spase Design as architect, and Jeremy Lee, a friend from the pub trade, as commercial director.
Planning permission for the restoration and the new build took more than two years and the results are spectacular. “There’s nothing in the building we haven’t touched: every room, every floor, every door and window,” Pitman says.
A remarkable amount of original fabric survived and has been restored, including the Thornhill mural and the splendid staircase with inlay decoration, which had been invisible under layers of blackened varnish. “This is not a white box,” Pitman says, an understatement for colour schemes taken from original inventories, including a purple room papered with hand-printed purple and gold (the chinoiserie was Cannon’s choice, completed with a Georgian chinoiserie fireplace from his own collection) and a scarlet room with specially woven damask wall covers. The brilliantly coloured carpets—“woven in England from English wool”, Pitman stresses—are based on Georgian pattern books.
A number of sculptures by Jenny Pickford came from the collection of Michael Cannon, who initiated the restoration
Samuel Kennedy
The missing man at the opening celebrations was Cannon himself; he died last summer, aged 84. Both Lee and Pitman swallow hard discussing their sadness that although his widow remains a trustee, Cannon never saw their finished work. “But Michael is everywhere in the house,” Pitman says. The giant agapanthus flowers in the garden, by the sculptor Jenny Pickford, came from Cannon’s art collection. He designed part of the restaurant, incorporating the stuffed fish he included in all pub renovations. The most touching of the opening exhibitions is a display of flower paintings by Cannon’s mother Mildred, known as Didy, who, as a Bristol teenager, won an art-school scholarship. But she was from a working-class background and had to get a job instead.
Events—planned to include visual arts, music, film and opera—will be programmed by Dorset Visual Arts. The future programme promises a mixture of Dorset artists and craft makers, and major touring exhibitions.
The trust has committed to supporting the project for the next two years, but after that The Sherborne is expected to be self-financing through income from the cafe, bar, 70-seat restaurant and new pavilion, which is large enough to host weddings and corporate events as well as film screenings.
Pitman and Lee decline to reveal the cost of the whole project, executed without any of the usual heritage grants.
“Lots,” Lee says thoughtfully. “Lots.”