Hill Hall (Essex) facts for kids
Hill Hall is a grand old house from the Elizabethan era located in Theydon Mount, a village near Epping in Essex, England. Even though English Heritage owns it, many parts of the building are private apartments today. It is a very important historical building, listed as Grade I.
Hill Hall is special for two main reasons. First, it has some of the earliest examples of classical decoration found on any building still standing in Britain. You can see this in the rows of columns and detailed carvings on the courtyard walls. It also features 'giant' columns on the outside, which means they stretch up through two floors! Second, a big fire in 1969 destroyed most of the inside, but amazingly, a series of wall paintings on the first floor survived. These paintings were made around the time the house was built in the late 1500s and are rare examples of classical art from that period.
History of Hill Hall
The house was originally built for a famous diplomat named Sir Thomas Smith. He started building it during the time of Queen Elizabeth I, replacing an even older house from the 1100s that stood on the same spot. Construction happened in stages between 1567 and 1573, whenever Sir Thomas was not busy being an ambassador in France. The house sits within a large park, about 50 hectares (120 acres) in size, which was designed by a famous landscape architect named Humphrey Repton.
The Smith family, who later became known as the Bowyer-Smyth family, lived in Hill Hall until the mid-1800s.
During World War II, Hill Hall was used as a place for people evacuated from London. Pregnant women from the East End of London stayed there, and many babies were born at the hall during this time. Later, Hill Hall was used to house women until a fire in 1969 caused a lot of damage. After the fire, the building became part of the Heritage Trust. You can sometimes take tours to see the amazing wall paintings inside. An expert from the British Museum, Croft-Murray, described these paintings as the most important surviving Elizabethan decorative figure paintings in England.
Local stories say that Hill Hall was once the place where seven brothers fought a duel over a beautiful girl, and all of them were killed. It's also said that a ghostly black dog haunts the area around the hall.
