HORD DRACONIS: the beginnings of Hordle Hall

Miniature Madness

When I was a kid, my Dad was into model railways and my Mum was into dolls houses, so it was inevitable I would end up with a secret passion for all things small. On family holidays we would always visit National Trust properties and I would fantasise about living in a castle or stately home of my own, planning out on graph paper how each room would look and how the rooms would fit together. 

However, I also always wanted to perform on stage, and I knew that I would never be able to afford my own real life Country pad as a jobbing actor, so at about the age of twelve, I set about the mad project that will probably now dominate the rest of my life: making my very own castle... in miniature. 

Back then, I used to work in 1:12 scale making miniatures for my Mum's dolls houses, so my eye was already attuned to that scale, and I had already started collecting some 1:12 items for the castle from dolls house fairs: fireplaces, a Victorian kitchen oven unit, suits of armour, swords, and canons. So when my Dad offered to help me saw up the plywood for the Great Hall, I knew it had to be 1:12 scale but viewed from unusual perspectives so that it could be slightly smaller than an exact model. Little did I know in my teens how large this little house would grow up to be. I wish now I had chosen 1:24! 

The walls of the Great Hall were finished in my teens, complete with bought panelling and stone flooring and fireplace made from old cereal packet cardboard. My main inspiration was Athelhampton Hall in Dorset (although I had only ever seen photographs of it in books, below). 

But as I was distracted by A-Levels and University, finding a job in the City and moving to London, and then going to drama school and starting a performing career, the Hall was sadly abandoned, without a roof or a rood screen, and with plans for the cardboard mullion oriel window barely passed the template stage. So there in my brother's garden shed, the Hall was left to decay, gradually falling prey to the ravages of time, like so many if its real life ancestors, a ruin.

When I had a real life property of my own (nothing as grand as the dreamed of stately home of my youth) my brother returned the shell of the Great Hall to my hands. The whitewashed walls were damp with mould, and the panelling was disintegrating after its 20 year neglect. So I set about restoring the panels with replacement card and wood stain, and began constructing the hammer beam roof from bits of old oak (work is still underway as I haven't worked out how to make the curved girders). 

In four months at home whilst temping, I had completed the rood screen too, made from coffee stirrers, cocktail sticks, an old wooden fan, statuettes from country house gift shops, and a postcard of Oxford Colleges' coats of arms. 

And I realised that the miniature madness of my youth was still an immutable passion in my adulthood. Soon I was researching every stately home and castle in Britain for ideas, and the graph paper plans of my teens became a full blown blueprint for a 20 room manor house, complete with chapel and dungeon, library and ballroom.

This blog will be the story of my miniature madness from this point on, in the hope that what has been for me up until now a private pastime might bring some delight, fascination or inspiration to anyone else in the world who is interested.