A local revival

A local initiative has returned a major country house from a building in danger to a well-loved and intensively used property. John Martin Robinson reports

- John Martin Robinson

Lytham Hall, Lancashire

A property of the Heritage Trust for the North West 

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).