ASHLEIGH Owners and Occupiers (continued):

For two years the house was unoccupied, then in 1892 Harold Dingwall Bateson, M.A., solicitor (Bateson, Bright & Warr) became tenant. The R.V. £187 and ownership remaining with the Exors of Mrs Farnworth. He was tenant until 1905 and the house was again empty for a year before the next tenant Charlotte Young took possession. Her R.V. dropped to £136, the land is marked 'void' in the Rates Book and she seems to have reverted to the old name of Ashleigh. She was still there in 1920, the year when only 3 houses in Woolton Park were occupied - Ashleigh, Ingleton & Woolton Tower, but in 1922 Albert Jackson was there as caretaker. 1923 sees 2 names associated with the house - Robert H. Maudsley and John G. Bolton. In 1925 it appears to be empty, but we suggest that alterations were in progress, as by 1936 the Directory shows 5 separate dwellings at Ashleigh.

WOOLTON TOWER, Tower Way c.1856-7
Architect - unidentified.

A large house (now occupied as three) all of stone, with the entrance facing east to Tower Way, formerly the carriage drive, and a Tower over the entrance porch. A ballroom was added in 1875-76 in similar rock faced masonry but with token half-timbered panels.

Though High Victorian in date it is not totally so in mood or architectural vocabulary. Its eclecticism is High Victorian, but the design as a whole lacks the punch and the vigour-and-go of Rogue Gothic (the red-meat end of the High Victorian scale); nor does it have the moral earnestness of the parsonage style as we see it handled by such masters as Butterfield (see his Coalpit Heath vicarage, Gloucestershire of 1844) or Street (see his St Margaret's vicarage, Princes Road c.1869). And Pugin would have found the sham military features of its Tower offensive.

The Tower is a 'Prospect Tower' - and there is a splendid view - and is primarily a status symbol (Queen Victoria had two at Osborne House, begun in 1845.) This is a tower derived from a medieval castle complete with battlements, machicolations and cross firing loops, but the cross firing loops here are set in the battlements whereas in a real castle they would have been in the curtain wall or on a lower floor. Here too are pointed windows, but set under Tudor shield labels.

continued . . .