Overlooked Britain: Seaton Delaval Hall, Northumberland
Sir Francis Delaval added an equine palace to Seaton Delaval, Vanbrugh’s baroque jewel
The expression ‘stone cold’ comes chillingly and beautifully to life, even in summer, with the stables of Seaton Delaval in Northumberland. Feeling frozen to the marrow of your bones, you are surrounded by stone on all sides, to outstandingly noble effect.
It stands on the bleak windswept flatlands hard by the North Sea. Pity the photographer who took the picture opposite – ie me. I was chilled to the very roots of my boots when I took it.
Every centimetre of the building is made of cold, grey stone: the walls of finely dressed stone, the three broad, segmental transverse arches – all ashlar – the softly bulging floors, the stall partitions, the arched mangers and the hay racks.
The stables are of a monumental dignity worthy of attribution to Sir John Vanbrugh, the architect of the great house these stables were built to serve. In fact, the stables date from a full 50 years later. Vanbrugh’s Palladian, laced-through-with-baroque masterstroke of Seaton Delaval Hall was started in 1718; the stables were begun in 1768.
Admiral George Delaval had commissioned Vanbrugh to design the house, writing that the architect was ‘not disposed to starve the design at all’.
Together, they forged forth with a forceful and aggressive masterpiece. The stables were, it would seem, the work of Delaval’s dashing great-nephew, Sir Francis Delaval.
There is no record of the architect, but a letter he wrote to his brother tells us all. Having seen Lord Hopetoun’s ‘very magnificent stables’ at Hopetoun House in Midlothian, designed by John Adam between 1750 and 1756 – now, I’m afraid, converted into a gin bar – Delaval was determined to build his own on the same ‘grand plan’.
He wrote of the ‘stone divisions of the stalls, which I am sure you will like as they are very agreeable to the rest of the building. No man has finer horses than we saw there and they have received no inconvenience from the stone.’
He triumphed: the interior of the Northumberland stables is far more beautiful than that of those in Scotland. Furthermore, as a west wing had already been added to the front of Seaton Delaval, this corresponding stable block to the east gave a handsome new symmetry to the façade of the house.
What an equine palace: 68 feet long by 35 feet wide, reflecting the newly fashionable and much-to-be-welcomed admiration for neoclassical stable design.
Three great arches sweep up to almost the full height of the building, with the central one spanning an apse in which there is a Venetian window looking out on the stable yard.
There are 12 stalls, each with a lead-lined feeding trough, below elegantly arched niches for the hay racks. Most endearingly, the name of each of the first horses to live here after 1768 was painted in graceful longhand above the keystones of the arched niches – and they survive to this day: Zephyrus, Hercules, Tartar, Regulus, Peacock, Julius, Chance, Prince, Pilot, Captain, Admiral and Steady. There they all are, the intimacy of their names most poignantly piercing through time.
When this top-notch beauty of a building was finished, Sir Francis Delaval held a celebratory banquet down the main aisle of the stables. Let us imagine at least a few of the horses’ heads nodding over the proceedings.
Sir Francis was one of the 13 children who were known as ‘the Gay Delavals’ on account of their colourful, outlandish pursuits – and he was the most colourful of the lot. As an MP, Knight of the Bath, soldier and dilettante, he would regularly stage his own theatricals, which were neither mean nor modest events.
When playing the title role in his
production of Othello, he was given the Drury Lane Theatre for the evening – by no less than David Garrick himself. Even more exceptional, Parliament was adjourned two hours early for this performance!
Sir Francis loved practical jokes and installed devilish devices at Seaton Delaval: one that lowered the beds of his unsuspecting guests into tanks of icy cold water in the middle of the night; another that slid the walls aside to reveal the occupants of the adjacent bedroom.
The stables were his last great act of extravagance. While they have remained miraculously untouched and unspoilt by time, the house has suffered near-terminal disasters. As early as 1752 there was a fire in the west wing, and then in 1822 a fire ravaged the main block.
Yet every cloud, however dark, has a silver lining. With its dividing walls and floors gone, Vanbrugh’s skeleton of stone was revealed to be nobly rising up the full height of the building. And so it remained until the 1950s, when Lord and Lady Hastings, Delaval descendants, moved into the west wing and set about making what repairs they could.
After their deaths in 2007, in December 2009 the great skeletal hulk was taken over by the National Trust. Millions of pounds were needed – and millions of pounds were raised, thanks to an unprecedented groundswell of local support.
What many consider to be Vanbrugh’s greatest work – and he also built Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard – Seaton Delaval now stands safe and sound, enjoyed by local people, on the outskirts of Newcastle upon Tyne.
With this tour de force, Vanbrugh produced a triumph of originality; no doubt an expression of his always having loved the north as opposed to what he called ‘the tame, sneaking south’. With his architectural adventure of Seaton Delaval and its stables, he showed where his sympathies lay.
‘Sir Francis loved practical jokes and installed devilish devices…’