The Trentham Estate was the Leveson-Gower family’s seat in Staffordshire, and has a similar history to their Lilleshall Estate in Shropshire. Trentham is to the south of the modern city of Stoke-on-Trent and beside the River Trent. A priory was probably established at Trentham in Anglo-Saxon times, but after hundreds of years of existence it was dissolved by Henry VIII in 1537. The estate was sold and within a few years passed to the same James Leveson who bought the former Lilleshall Abbey estate. Parts of the priory buildings have survived in the parish church of St Mary and All Saints adjacent to the current boundary of Trentham Gardens.
A series of houses were built on the site until in the 1830s Charles Barry remodelled the house in a grand Italianate style for the 2nd Duke of Sutherland, and laid out the formal garden immediately to the south of it. This house became the family’s principal residence outside London until it was abandoned in 1905 and demolished in 1913.
The gardens to the south of the hall include a lake with several islands which was largely created in the 18th century by the garden designer Capability Brown, with views of the surrounding parkland and to Tittensor Hill to the south where there is a 26 metre high monument to the 1st Duke of Sutherland. Unlike the plain stone obelisk on Lilleshall Hill, this includes a 3 metre high statue of the Duke, looking north towards the hall, following the same design as the Ben Bhraggie monument in northern Scotland on the Sutherland Estate.
The 4th Duke decided to abandon the hall in 1905 due to river pollution from the city of Stoke-on-Trent and its industries, and offered the building first to the county and then to the new city of Stoke-on-Trent, to be used for some type of higher education institution. I suppose that involved an implicit suggestion that if the city cleaned up its act, the offered land and buildings would be far more useful and valuable. In the end, all of these offers were refused and the Duke decided to demolish the building, reusing and selling some of the architectural elements, and retaining a few on site at Trentham.
During most of the 20th century the Gardens were opened to the fee-paying public with boats on the lake and a miniature railway, and a dance hall was built in 1931. Much like Lilleshall Hall and the nearby Alton Towers between the wars. It’s perhaps just chance that neither Lilleshall nor Trentham was developed into a full scale theme park like Alton Towers. Lilleshall became the National Sports Centre and in 2000 Trentham Gardens was redeveloped with a large garden centre, retail village of premium shops, and a ticketed area covering the former site of the hall, the formal gardens, and lake. Tittensor Hill with the 1st Duke’s monument and the King’s Wood area of the park land are freely accessible, and there is a public right of way through the park.
To the northeast of the Gardens, on the other side of the A34 Stone Road is the Trentham Mausoleum, built by the future 1st Duke in 1808. The intention was to place the coffins of members of the Leveson-Gower family in the heavy stone building, rather like a church crypt but above ground level. However the coffins were buried below ground in 1907 within the graveyard when the 4th Duke decided to break the family’s connection to Trentham. No doubt he was worried about the maintenance of the building and the dignity of his 7 forebears who were now buried. The mausoleum is in an Ancient Egyptian style and is surrounded by the more conventional graves and headstones of estate workers. It is fascinating to walk round reading the names and occupations. The comparison with an Egyptian pharaoh in his pyramid surrounded by the modest tombs of his loyal subjects was no doubt deliberate.
