52 CONTEXT 183 : MARCH 2025 Book reviews Manorial odyssey Northwold Manor Reborn: architecture, archaeology and restoration of a derelict Norfolk house Warwick Rodwell with Diane Gibbs, Oxbow Books, 2024, 324 pages, 392 illustrations, hardback ISBN 979 8 888571 34 7, £74.55, digital edition ISBN 979 8 888571 35 4, £33 This book tells the fascinating story of the rescue of a derelict listed building at great length and in meticulous detail. Northwold Manor fronts onto the high street of a small linear village in Norfolk immediately opposite the medieval church. It is a complicated building of various dates. The principal structure is a symmetrical brick house dating from the mid-17th century of five bays with a central entrance and a projecting rear wing. It is flanked at one end by a taller brick wing with a pedimented entrance tower dated 1814. A separate flint cottage at the other end was linked to the main house later in the 19th century. The manor was last occupied as a principal residence in 1955 before passing through the hands of a sequence of property speculators and developers before it was purchased in 1963 by a London-based architect who had previously prepared plans for its total demolition. He subsequently moved to Africa and the house became a repository for immense amounts of decaying secondhand furniture purchased by his wife at local auctions. Over the next 20 years, despite the offer of a grant from English Heritage and pressure from the Norfolk Historic Buildings Trust, the abandoned house gradually declined into total dereliction to become one of the most threatened buildings at risk in the country and was featured on the front page of the annual report of SAVE. In 2003 the local authority issued a repairs notice which was ignored by the owner, and it was only a decade later that the subsequent compulsory purchase order, backed up by an agreement with the buildings trust, came into force. However, the estimated cost of restoration by now was so high that the trust was forced to withdraw. It was at this crucial stage that Warwick Rodwell and his wife Diane Gibbs were looking for a home in East Anglia to retire to. With heroic courage they agreed to step in and buy the property once the CPO had been confirmed. There was one further hitch when the owner challenged the CPO through a judicial review. When this failed, they finally completed their purchase in 2014. Rodwell and Gibbs have spent the best part of the following decade in an exemplary restoration project, which has been characterised by the unforeseen challenges brought about by the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic and the unprecedented rise in the cost of building materials. As one would expect from one of our most eminent archaeologists, Rodwell began his daunting task with the detailed background research that he considered essential to his understanding of the building in formulating his approach to its restoration. The book begins with an analysis of the historic development of the village and the relationship of the Manor House to its surroundings, followed by chapters which give a detailed architectural history of its fabric, and its various owners and occupants. These three chapters take up a third of the book, and although Rodwell’s research is crucial to all that follows, his conclusions could have been summarised more briefly for the general reader. It is only when he turns to the decline of the estate and the battle to preserve it that the book really comes alive with a chronological account of the course of the restoration. It is a testament to the value of meticulous research at every stage of the lengthy process, explaining not only the interventions that they took to make the house habitable again, but also the appropriate decoration of every room and the making of a worthy garden setting. They have created something totally unique and, in the relentless
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