Qualla: Adlington Hall

Adlington Hall: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Handel played the organ in the Great Hall at Adlington in 1741 or 1742, on an instrument set into a sixteenth-century timber-framed wing of a fifteenth-century house, in a private room belonging to friends of his. The organ is still there. So is the Great Hall, built between 1480 and 1505. So is the family that hosted him: the Leghs of Adlington, who have lived on this site since the early fourteenth century, when an heiress named Ellen brought it into their line. Seven hundred years of continuous tenure is not the longest in England, but it is one of the longest, and it is written into the building like growth rings.

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Adlington Hall: From a Saxon Lodge to the Leghs

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The earliest known building on the site was an Anglo-Saxon hunting lodge owned by Earl Edwin of Mercia. After the Norman Conquest of 1066 the estate was granted to Hugh Lupus, the first Norman Earl of Chester, and it stayed with the Norman earls until 1221, when it passed to the ...

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Adlington Hall: The Civil War and the Casing in Brick

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

During the English Civil War, Adlington Hall was occupied by Parliamentarian forces. Country houses in Cheshire were often turned into temporary garrisons or quartered with troops by whichever side held the surrounding territory, and the Leghs found themselves living on a propert...

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Adlington Hall: Charles Legh's Reinvention

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In the middle of the eighteenth century, the house was inherited by Charles Legh, who set about transforming it. Between 1749 and 1757 he built a new west wing containing a ballroom, and a south wing with a large portico of four Ionic columns rising the full height of the buildin...

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Adlington Hall: The 1928 Reduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the early twentieth century Adlington Hall was simply too large for its family to maintain. In 1928 the building was reconstructed and reduced in size. Much of Charles Legh's west wing was demolished, a screen wall was built to fill the gap, and parts of the south wing were re...

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Adlington Hall: Designation, Sale and Sherlock

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Adlington Hall was designated a Grade I listed building on 25 July 1952, the highest level of protection in the English heritage system, reserved for buildings of exceptional interest and sometimes considered to be internationally important. The grounds are separately registered ...

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