The History of Glencot House

Glencot House was built for William Sampson Hodgkinson the benevolent owner of the Wookey Hole paper mills. It took about 11 years to build, cost £55,000 and was completed in 1887. He chose the site of a former mill owners house belonging to a Major Coles. The house was called Little Glencot and had burnt down so he demolished the remains and built the house you see today.

Mr. Hodgkinson commissioned the architects Ernest George and Harold Peto to design and build the house. They were renowned Victorian architects who specialised in recreating the architecture of bygone eras and this can be seen at Glencot, which is built in a Jacobean style.

Glencot is idyllically sited overlooking the river Axe with lovely south westerly facing gardens. The grounds where the cricket pitch is now were known as the 'Pleasure Gardens' and were by all accounts beautifully cultivated. There were tennis courts and a yew enclosed croquet lawn as well as the cricket pitch, all immaculately kept.

There is also a coach house and walled gardens, but these were all sadly sold off from the estate in the 70's. The Hodgkinson family sold off the whole estate in 1933 and a family called Williamson who came from New Zealand owned it for a few years, and in the last few years they have been in contact with us and sent a lovely collection of photographs, it was then sold again to Lady Brickwood. She and her family had lived in a much larger mansion and looked on Glencot as a small country retreat. Her son Sir Basil Brickwood has become a good friend who frequently visits and tells us stories of his life at Glencot. He is always enraged when he tells how his stepfather knocked down one of the pillars in front of the house to build a garage for his car. All the stones and the top are still lying in the shrubbery and we hope to rebuild it one day!

After the war the house was sold to a Mr. Bright, a tailor from London, who made a lot of money and thought he would invest in the country. He had various plans to turn Glencot into an hotel and to create a farm at the coach house. In fact he seemed to do his utmost to ruin the gardens, he loved concrete and built pigsties and cowsheds in the rose gardens and filled a large part of the walled garden with concrete paths. He lived in the coach house himself and rented the house out to be a school, which it was until 1974. The school was run by a Mr and Mrs Adams and it was a 'crammer' for Bromsgrove Grammar School taking in a lot of boys from overseas. We have a constant stream of them visiting and recalling their school days and boyish exploits. They all look for their name carved on the tree next to the greenhouse.

It seems Mr Adams was quite a character and under his rule it had quite a Dickensian atmosphere. He was removed from the school and finally took off to pursue his drinking career in Ireland and left the school to be run by Mrs Adams and the governors, until the father of one of the local boys bought the house and lived in part of it and divided the rest into bedsits.

Glencot was again sold in 1981 to a family from the village who had various plans for it, but came up against a lot of local opposition. They did some restoration work and then the house lay empty for two years until it was purchased in 1985 and gradually restored to become an hotel as it is today.

There is one group of photographs, on the stairway to the lower ground floor, showing the drawing room as it was in 1889, Mr and Mrs Hodgkinson and various views of the gardens. It is interesting to see how quickly the trees by the river have grown. The garden photos were taken in 1933 and none of the large trees which you now see were there then, and compare the size of the cedar tree which is in front of the existing pillar!

Another group shows the staff here in 1929, the young lady in the bottom picture was then the kitchen maid. She is now an elderly lady and kindly gave me the photos to copy. She told me that during the time she worked here she never set foot in the gardens or caught a glimpse of the library or the drawing room, but she remembers her working days at Glencot as being happy and speaks of the kindness of her employers.

There is also a copy of the Brickwood family coat of arms, which Sir Basil Brickwood kindly gave us. His family owned the house during the second world war.

In 2006 Glencot House was bought by Martin Miller, the renowned founder of Miller's antiques guides and he set about refurbishing the hotel with a vast array of eclectic antiques and curiosities.