Posted on Friday 2 November 2007
The 18th-century stately home, Sherborne House, which acted as a retreat for Charles Dickens, is to be sold after plans failed to convert it into an arts centre.
The dilapidated building in West Dorset, features a hall mural by Sir James Thornhill, the leading decorative history painter of his day, and a Tudor wing from a previous building.
While it has been in the hands of the county council since 1930s, hopes of restoring the house were extinguished when the Sherborne House Trust failed to secure a £3m lottery funding bid. Further proposals to transform the property into an arts centre have been rejected. The council explained the plans from the House Trust were “overambitious” and not finacially viable.
The most notable resident of the property was actor-manager, William Charles Macready, who held the lease between 1850 and 1860. During this period his close friends, Dickens and William Makepiece Thackeray, often visited, with Dickens performing public readings of his work, including A Christmas Carol.
The council had intended to lease the building, which receives 25,000 visitors a year, to the trust. However it believed that the trust's plans would still leave a £750,000 shortfall for restoration on top of a funding gap likely to exceed £50,000 a year. Hilary Cox, cabinet member for the environment at Dorset council, said: "It is very sad, but the business case doesn't stack up. And there is no additional funding available from the county council - or the district or town councils - to plug the gaps."
Sherborne House is set be put up for sale on the open market "as soon as practicable".
The trust's chair, John Miller, said the house had been due to hold sculptor Dame Elizabeth Frink's first permanent collection after restoration and speculated that the council "just want to dump the liability".