Elm Tree Farm, including outbuildings, boundary walls and gatepiers, and historic stone surfaces

Summary

A farmstead of 1883 built by the trustees of James Mellor Kershaw, MP for Stockport., It comprises farmhouse, barn, shippons, stables and looseboxes in one building, as well as detached pigsties and outhouse with laundry, WC, coalhouse and dairy. The completeness of the complex and its historic fabric is unusually good, especially in an urban setting.

Reasons for Designation

Elm Tree Farm, an integrated farmstead of 1883, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* it is an unusually large and architecturally-sophisticated integrated farmstead for a small dairy farm, with a notable street frontage more akin to continental farmsteads, and belvedere skylight and dated keystones to the barn;

* the survival of historic fabric is notably good, including extensive stone floors, stone stall dividers to the shippons, a mash pit and a complete stables interior with cast-iron and timber stall dividers, mangers, water troughs and wooden tack pegs. The farmhouse also retains a relatively intact interior, including stone flooring, fire surrounds, timber doors and cupboards, and a spiral service stair to attic servants’ rooms;

* the interest is enhanced by the survival of the complex as a whole, which retains ancillary buildings, including pigsties, domestic outbuildings, setted entrance and yard, boundary walls, slab gateposts and water trough, and mid-C19 toll-bar gateposts with gaslight features;

* it is a rare survival of farm buildings in a built-up area, and an important reminder of a pre-urban past.

History

Elm Tree Farm is dated 1883, and is very little altered since it was built. The farm’s name appears to have followed a local tradition, with the earlier Yew Tree farm and Pear Tree farm (later the site of Pear Mill) each within 300m. The building was approved as fit for human habitation by the Bredbury and Romiley local board on 18 December 1883. It was built for the trustees of the late Mr James Kershaw. The datestone bears the initials JMK, thought to stand for James Mellor Kershaw. James Kershaw (1795 – 1864) had owned India Mill, a weaving mill less than 3km away from the farm, close to Stockport viaduct. He had been the mayor of Manchester and then MP for Stockport. His considerable estate included bequests of £5000 to each of the two sons of his own son (also named James), who had died around 1860. It is thought that James Mellor Kershaw might have been one of these grandsons of James Kershaw senior. The cotton manufacturing firm of Kershaw, Leese and Company continued to operate into the C20, and was acquired in 1930 by the Lancashire Cotton Corporation as part of industry restructuring.

The farm was built with efficient process-flow in mind, based on the improved agriculture movement of the late-C19. This is manifest in the combination of the farmhouse and the main agricultural building, but also in particular, the north-west corner of the barn housed a mash pit designed to receive brewery waste as cattle feed, and the northern shippon has hatches allowing hay to be passed directly into the mangers of the adjacent stable.

The farm was sited next to the former Bredbury toll bar, which had been rendered obsolete by an 1881 Act of Parliament that brought turnpike roads within local government control. When, around 1908, a steam engine crashed into the toll house and it was demolished, the bar’s gateposts were re-sited to the entrance of the farm, complete with their gas lamps, now converted to electricity.

An early tenant is thought to have been John Holland, whose initials adorn the watering hole in the northern boundary wall; this was installed between the survey for the 1898 1:2,500 Ordnance Survey map, and 1902 when the farm was taken on by William Cheetham. The farm has remained in the same family since.

Houses were built along the main road to the west of the farmstead in the early 1930s, and in 1936 were also built immediately to the north, resulting in a farmstead completely surrounded by suburban domestic development since before the Second World War.

In the early C21 a small bathroom was created off the western bedroom, at first-floor within the barn, without affecting the southern shippon below. The roofs of the pigsties were also replaced with a corrugated modern roof, that spans the midden between them. Elm Tree Farm remained a dairy and cattle farm until the Covid 19 pandemic affected cattle movements, since when goats have been the main stock.

Details

A farmstead of 1883 built by the trustees of James Mellor, MP.

MATERIALS: red brick with dressings of buff sandstone and blue engineering brick, and blue slate roofs. A pigsty is all of buff sandstone, floors and yards are paved with native stone flags and setts, and stone is also used for stall dividers and low slab walls. Cast-iron rainwater goods.

PLAN: a complete farmstead, comprising a combination building with farmhouse occupying a single bay at the south end, and barn, shippons, stables and looseboxes to the north, as well as detached pigsties and an outhouse with laundry, WC, coalhouse and dairy.

EXTERIOR: standing to the north of Stockport Road. The principal building is of two storeys plus an attic, with a four-bay gabled farmhouse frontage. This has blue-brick plinth, quoining, segmental-arch heads and twin head courses to each floor, with painted stone sills. The projecting verges have shaped purlin ends, and a small truss with finial. The vertical sliding sash windows are of four panes; that to the left of the door has side-lights, and there are two windows to the attic in the gable; all have stop-chamfered brick jambs. The four-panel entrance door is in bay three, within a gabled, glazed timber porch with full exposed truss with pendant and finial to the king-post, pierced bargeboards, and a later glazed outer door.

The plinth, and twin bands of the ground and first floor, return along the east façade, which also has the same heads to openings as the front facade. At the left, the farmhouse bay has only a ground-floor window; in the roof a lateral chimney stack marks the line of the dividing wall between farmhouse and barn. The principal feature of the façade is the central cart entrance, which is round-arched with quoined jambs and stone imposts, and a keystone with the initials JMK and the stylised date 1883 in relief. The vertical-plank barn doors each have three very long split-ended hinge-plates. Flanking the cart entry are the shippons’ six-pane casement windows, and then their manure-passage doors (vertical-planked, with overlights). To the right are a window and two more split doors, accessing looseboxes. Below the prominent overhanging eaves, and aligned on the upper blue-brick band, are ventilation lozenges also in blue brick; three to the right and one to the left of the cart entrance. On the ridge above the cart entrance is an octagonal belvedere/lantern (with replacement plastic glazing) with weathervane.

The quoining, plinth and bands also return on the north end, which has the same gable treatment as the south front. The gable has a pitching eye, and the first floor two the same, with a ventilation lozenge between them, spanning the twin bands. At the left the ground floor has a window to the north-east loosebox. In the centre is a stable door flanked by similar windows. To the right are the square feed-unloading hatch and the window of the feed-preparation house.

The west façade is similar to the east (with a matching opposed cart entrance, also with initialled datestone), but in place of the looseboxes at the north end is the feed-preparation house, which has har-hung doors. Above the southern shippon door towards the right is the inserted bathroom window of the farmhouse. The kitchen entrance to the farmhouse is enclosed by a long lean-to porch of the later C20. Above this, an axial chimneystack stands on the wall between kitchen and parlour, roughly halfway to the ridge.

The pigsties stand at the north end of the yard, their west wall forming the external boundary, which is externally buttressed. They stand around 1.5m high. The west wall is of random-coursed stone, but the other sides are of regularly-coursed, rock-faced stone, with a coping with dressed margins. The eastern angles are rounded. In the centre of the east wall is a wide gap, with long-and-short quoins on the angles. A modern monopitch rood spans the whole building.

The domestic outhouse is of brick and is single-storey, gabled at the north and south ends. The south facade is blind, with a chimney stack to the south gable. The east façade has a nine-pane casement window at the left, and four doorways, all with stone thresholds and pintle stones. The dairy (at the left) has a split door, and the others are all vertically-planked. Pintle-stones to the two right hand doors have copperplate handwriting, apparently written using brick, labelling them as ‘CLOSET’ and ‘COAL HOUSE’. Adjacent to the dairy is a laundry. The north end also has two doorways, both now open. The west façade is blind save for a small window opening (now boarded) towards the north end.

INTERIOR: the farmhouse has inter-connected rooms off a stair hall in the entrance bay. The ground-floor rooms are all floored with stone flags. A cellar is also reported to be stone-flagged with stone shelving. In a vertical-planked enclosure in the western rooms is a timber spiral service stair, with ramped string and small windows in the partitions to borrow light. The main stair has turned newels and balusters, and a closed string. The rooms retain four-panelled doors and some modest picture rails and architraves, including to double cupboards to the right of the chimneybreast in the parlour (west of the stair). The bedrooms retain original fire surrounds and modest chimneypieces. The western bedroom retains a timber linen cupboard. In the north wall is an inserted opening to the later bathroom, which has no features of interest. The attic has a northern corridor and two rooms; the western room has a gas-light feature and a small original fireplace.

The barn is open to the rafters, with haylofts above the shippons. The central cartway is stone-flagged. The shippons flanking this have low stone-slab walls, and cast-iron columns with flanges supporting the hayloft cross-beams, which have decorative mouldings. Partitions of vertical planks and corrugated metal to the upper part of the shippons are not original. The shippons retain their stone stall dividers; in each, five taller ones define the bays, each of which is subdivided by a smaller divider to create ten stalls, with metal tethering posts to the left. The manure passages are floored in concrete, and concrete has also been added above the original stone floors of the stalls. The stalls also retain some drinking-water features which are thought to be historic. On the north wall of the northern shippon are four horizontally-sliding timber covers to feeding hatches accessing the stables and looseboxes to the north. In the north-west corner is the feed-preparation house, which is stone-flagged and retains a large mash-pit, as well as a small wall-mounted motor for pumping milking machinery.

The stables at the north-end are also stone-flagged, with decorative cast-iron columns and swept coping to the timber stall-dividers, a cast-iron water trough, and wall-mounted wrought-iron mangers and wooden pegs for tack and equipment. The north-eastern looseboxes have concrete floors but retain stone stall dividers.

The pigsty floors are stone-flagged; later walls of breeze-block divide the sties themselves from the former yard between them. The interiors of the outhouse are not thought to have any features of interest.

SUBSIDIARY FEATURES: the northern boundary wall has a random-coursed north face and a regularly-coursed, rock-faced inner face like that of the pigsties. In the centre is a south-facing setback, which houses a very large cast-iron water trough, marked ‘H.HOLLINGDRAKE & SON STOCKPORT’. Above this is an arched watering-hole opening, with voussoirs and long, carved impost stones, and a keystone inscribed ‘JH’ (for John Holland). The opening is now bricked up.

The yard to the west and north of the main building is paved in natural stone setts, with some raised flag pavements defined by kerbstones. To the east the yard is paved in flags. At the north-west corner of the site, and to the north-east of the main building, are pairs of tall, shouldered stone gateposts. Continuing the line of the west façade southwards is a garden wall of regular coursed rock-faced stone with chamfered copings, and dressed stone gateposts, also shouldered but with stop-chamfered jambs. At the south entrance to the site are a pair of stone gatepiers with stop-chamfered angles, and castellated octagonal caps with cast-iron moulded columns supporting lanterns (missing their hoods and glazing). A dry-stone garden wall and brick boundary walls to the south and west are of later date.

Sources

Books and journals
Bredbury and Romiley local board in Stockport Advertiser, ,Vol. , (21 Dec 1883), 8
Will of the late Mr James Kershaw, MP in Stockport Advertiser, ,Vol. , (22 July 1864), 2

End of official list entry