Building record 1232000000 - STOKE COURT

Grade II. 1845 and 1873 Elizabethan style mansion. Stucco over brick with stone details and plain tile roofs. Modern Tudor style clustered brick stacks. Two storey and attic. Stucco is lined as ashlar. Main front with central projecting 3 storey porch with 3-light mullion and transom attic window, armourial plaque at 1st floor and ground floor doorcase with arched doorway with attached columns and cornice over. Two gabled half dormers each side. Mullion and transom windows to main floors, 3-light and 2-light to left of porch, 2-light. Single light and 3-light to right of porch. Main garden front is also stuccoed with two large flat topped 3 sided bays projecting, one of two storeys the other of three within same height. Three window centre between bays with 1st floor windows rising into dormer gables. One window range beyond each bay, also with dormer gable. Mullion and transom windows with small panes all renewed. To right of entrance front is a C19 ashlar extension with tall 3-sided bay wndow, gable adjoining over 2 window range and 2 window range beyond. Mullion and transom windows. A modern addition extends beyond. The house was gutted by fire in 1979 and was rebuilt within the shell. Built on the site of the West End Cottage where Thomas Gray’s mother and aunt lived between 1742 and 1750. Gray wrote parts of the ‘Elergy in a Country Courtyard’ and the ‘Ode on a distant prospect of Eton College’ (B1).
Correspondence with the owner after the fire makes reference to the bricks recovered from the burnt out building and notes that, according to the deeds, the property/estate had its own tile kiln between 1641-1660. The letters note that the first mention of the Stoges Brick Kiln, which adjoined the property, was in 1694 (B2).