Rutland - October (219).qxp 07/09/2020 09:40 Page 16
STAMFORD’S ARCHITECTURE
Stamford in Six
BUILDINGS In a town with 600 listed buildings, how do you pick the most interesting...? Author Chris Davies’s book might help. It’s a guide to Stamford’s 50 most notable buildings, we’re featuring just a few here... Words: Chris Davies.
STAMFORD has a reputation for being one of England's finest stone towns. It has a happy mix of medieval and Georgian architecture that was untouched by the Industrial Revolution or later large-scale developments.
Stamford in 50 Buildings explores the history of the town through a selection of its greatest architectural treasures, from medieval churches to picturesque town centre buildings. Burghley House is a given, so we’ve omitted that here.
But choosing fifty buildings from a town that can boast 600 listed buildings was never going to be an easy task when Chris Davies created his book on the most notable 50 buildings in the town.
“Stamford is not a museum, and its buildings reflect the age in which they were built. In more modern times, such building has not always been sympathetic to the surrounding buildings or the townscape in general – buildings erected, as Sir Neil Cossons put it, ‘with thoughtless haste and ill considered imitation.’ Nevertheless, they are of their age, and we have to accept them as such.”
“Many may disagree with those I have chosen and feel that their favourite building should have been included. My apologies for that!” says Chris. “But I at least hope that they will understand the rationale behind my particular selection. What I have tried to do is to show something of Stamford’s history through its buildings and the people who lived in them.”
“I have therefore tried to select buildings that reflect Stamford’s long history, as well as having merit in their own right, 53 years since the town was named Britain’s first conservation area.”
1. ST LEONARD’S PRIORY... With the exception of the Cistercians, most of the major monastic orders were represented in Stamford, and remained here until the Dissolution of the Monasteries between 1536 and 1541. The Benedictine order was represented by St Michael’s Nunnery, which lay to the south-west, just outside St Martin’s parish, and St Leonard’s Priory, which was a Benedictine cell of Durham. There is an element of confusion about a foundation date for the priory. The belief among earlier historians was that St Leonard’s was founded in the seventh century by St Wilfred. The first reliable reference to St Leonard’s is in the confirmation of Durham’s possessions by Pope Eugenius in 1146. The main function of the priory seems to have been to manage Durham’s estates south of the Humber, but in the early fourteenth century it also prepared students for study at Oxford. For many years the priory was part of the Burghley estate and to judge from early drawings, seems to have been used for storage by the adjacent farm. The priory is now in the care of SKDC, but in recent years Stamford Civic Society have taken a leading role in caring for the site. n
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