The author Ursula Moray Williams, interviewed in 2005, holds a stone fragment of her childhood home
Pieces of Stoneham, archived and displayed in the Field Tent, 2008
The wedding day of Ursula Moray Williams, 1935
The motorised bicycle of the Archdeacon of Trinidad and Tobago
Wounded Belgian solders at North Stoneham House Hospital, 1914
A group at the Stoneham House Hospital, comprising Belgian officers, a Swaythling Remount officer, and members of the Willis Fleming and Sayers families, c.1915
An early photograph of Stoneham, from around 1870
North Stoneham House
This lost country house in Hampshire is the subject of an ongoing series of work that has included the formation of an archive (images, documents, oral histories, and artefacts), the staging of a temporary museum on the house's site, and architectural history studies (originally for an MRes History research project at Southampton University) of the house and its architect, Thomas Hopper (1776-1856).
Stoneham was a Greek Revival mansion built and rebuilt by Hopper for John Willis Fleming MP (1781-1844) over some twenty-five years from 1818, at a reputed cost of £100,000. The house passed through a number of uses and disuses before its demolition in 1939. With its unassimilated character, Stoneham is in many ways a signature work of its architect.
Stoneham was home to several families between the 1860s and 1930s, all living in different parts of the house. Stoneham also operated as a country club, and as a military hospital during the First World War. The research project includes interviews with five people who had lived or stayed at Stoneham for periods between 1920 and 1939. These latter-day consumers of Hopper's architecture conveyed a vivid sense of arrested drama, generated in part from the building's immense scale and sense of decay, but also from its idiosyncratic, stagy design. One interviewee was the author Ursula Moray Williams (1911-2006), who suggested that Stoneham had provided a lifetime's creative inspiration.
