LYTHAM HALL is a heartening story of the survival and revival of a distinguished Lancashire Georgian house. A fine work by Carr of York, echoing Fairfax House in York, it contains magnificent craftsmanship by the York School carver Daniel Shillitoe and the stuccoist Giuseppe Cortese (Fig 7). The house could easily have been demolished in the 1960s, but owes its survival to an unlikely chain of events and heroic local efforts. These have culminated in the full-scale restoration of the house and garden over the past five years. The photographs accompanying the present article show the rooms authentically decorated and fully furnished, with no hint of the economic vicissitudes, sales of contents, changes of ownership and intervening institutional use since the house was last recorded in these pages, when it was still in occupation by the family that originally commissioned it, the Cliftons (COUNTRY LIFE, July 21 and 28, 1960).
It is a cheerful red-brick gentry box with an understated Classical exterior
This year marks the 300th anniversary of John Carr’s birth, so it seems an appropriate time to revisit one of his best surviving houses: a cheerful redbrick gentry box with an understated Classical exterior, which is one of his masterpieces. Carr was commissioned to build the house in 1752 by Thomas Clifton (1727–83) and the main part was completed by 1764, although the drawing roomand dining room, the latter with an apsidal sideboard recess, were created in the 1790s for Clifton’s successor. Much of the furniture was supplied by Gillow of Lancaster, who frequently worked for fellow Catholics, as at Everingham in East Yorkshire for the Constables, another Carr house with strong parallels to Lytham.
