Monday, November 21, 2016

Mountsorrel Hall and Gladstone's birthplace


This is the former Mountsorrel Hall in Leicestershire. This striking 18th-century brick building in a village built largely from the local granite was at first a private house but later became the rectory for the village.

As Pevsner observes, the house does not really go back far enough to justify this grand facade.

On the building is a modern plaque telling us that William Gladstone's birthplace in Rodney Street, Liverpool, was a copy of Mountsorrel Hall.

As the photograph below, taken from a post on The Victorian Web by Jaqueline Banerjee, shows, while there are similarities between the two buildings, this is a fanciful claim.


1 comment:

  1. Fascinating. I hear stories like this quite often. There's some vague link between a building and another building that is famous in some way (or is associated with a famous person) and this gets inflated so that people think one is a copy of the other.

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