Francis Jonathan Clarke was a successful Lincoln High Street chemist, to demonstrate his success he commissioned his brother-in-law, Albert Vickers, to design a house to rival Sibthorp’s Canwick Hall, the result: Bracebridge Hall.
The Hall was completed in 1883 in “A brash and chunky High Victorian" (Pevsner) style. A Gothic design, the heavy porch faces west onto Newark Road, standing in extensive grounds, stretching from just south of the Gatehouse public house to All Saints Church and bounded by the railway in the east.
The area around the Hall was wooded with a fish pond of almost half an acre to the south of the Hall, the rest of the grounds, amounting to about 18 acres, was laid out as parkland. The decorated lodge was completed in 1884.
Lincoln was a major centre of agricultural engineering and heavily polluted with smoke and smells from the many factory and house chimneys in the city. At this time Bracebridge was still a village but within easy reach of Lincoln city centre by the new horse tram service which terminated in the village.
Francis Clarke died in 1888 at the age of 46 after developing serious lung and heart problems. George Bainbridge the draper was living there in 1894. In 1918 it became Bracebridge Hall Club (see below) for employees of W Foster & Co and in the 1930s and 1940s it was part of Bracebridge Heath (Mental) Hospital.
Later it became the offices of Gothic Electrical and it is now Grosvenor Hall Care Home.
Between the wars Bracebridge Hall's extensive grounds were reduced for the building of housing on Brant Road and the “Tree Streets” behind the Hall. Recently the grounds have been further reduced until it stands on land hardly bigger than its footprint.
Bracebridge Hall Club
 |
| The Engineer 1918 March 8th |