An American actor and director who moved to Northern England to renovate a 600-year-old derelict hall once belonging to his ancestors is sharing the exciting restoration process with the world.
Michigan native Hopwood DePree, 53, moved to Manchester, England, from Los Angeles in 2017 to begin the epic, years-long restoration of the 600-year-old, 60-room Hopwood Hall, a building he once believed existed only in his bedtime stories.
“When I was a child, my grandfather always used to tell me about a ‘Hopwood Castle,’ as he called it, and I always thought it was bedtime stories or fairytales,” Mr. DePree told The Epoch Times. "My grandfather was also named Hopwood, and he was so very proud of the name, but as a child, I would get teased for it.
“But I loved it when he would tell me these stories. I guess I always thought it was a way for him to make me feel engaged with the name Hopwood and to have the same pride that he did.”
An Urgent Ticking Clock
One night in 2013, when Mr. DePree was exploring a genealogy website, he found a black-and-white photograph of the hall, which dates from the early 1400s, and was immediately struck by the resemblance to his grandfather’s stories. He then sent an email inquiry.“By the time I woke up the next morning, I had responses in my inbox from the council, and from some caretaker who’s a local historian, saying, ‘When are you coming to England?’” he said.
Mr. DePree and his family then visited England to see the hall as part of a family vacation to Europe. After returning to Los Angeles, he couldn’t get the hall out of his mind as he continued to carry on his job as a producer, screenwriter, and actor.
“I was so moved by the beauty of the hall and the sense of history, but also that there was this urgent ticking clock,” he said, “that if nothing was done to save it in the next five to 10 years, it was going to be lost forever.”
Describing the condition of the hall, Mr. DePree said it was “stunning,” but at the same time, it had vines growing in through the windows, there was dry rot, and there were pieces of plaster falling off the ceiling as he moved from room to room.
“It was very unsafe, really falling down, and had continued to be attacked by vandals and thieves,” he said.
In an attempt to save it, Mr. DePree began visiting Manchester two or three times a year to help spearhead a restoration effort. He found there was a “tremendous community passion” to save the hall, and it was one of those symbolic buildings that meant a lot to people in the community. But since Hopwood Hall had been possessed by the local council, was listed on Historic England’s “heritage at risk” register, and is grade-two listed—meaning it’s counted among England’s top 5% of buildings of historical importance—to renovate the hall would require a plan, a contract, and a timeline, not to mention a huge sum of money.
By September 2017, Mr. DePree realized he'd signed himself up for a full-time job and decided to move to England.
A Vision
Restoration began in 2019 after setting up the Hopwood Foundation Friends Group—a community group that helps out on a weekly basis—and securing funding from Historic England, National Lottery, Architectural Heritage Fund, and others, plus forming connections with heritage experts and sourcing heritage materials to preserve the historical integrity of the building.However, for the next two years, they had to close down all renovation work owing to the pandemic.
Once the restoration efforts began, the process started with the roof, as getting the hall watertight was the most crucial step.
“[T]he roof has taken us years because it’s a large building and quite complex in terms of weight distribution, and some of the timbers that are holding up these very, very heavy, huge slate stones have been the victim of dry rot and other conditions due to the water ingress and weather,” Mr. DePree said. “[W]e’re focused on the roof and shoring up areas that had already collapsed.”
In the next phase, they plan to work on more intricate interior features and details, Mr. DePree said.
He also hopes to bring the banquet room, built in 1689 for a family wedding, and the old parlor, which is the oldest room in the hall, back to life first. His vision is for the hall to become a cultural hub and a venue for events, school tours, film screenings, concerts, and weddings.
The original owners of Hopwood Hall were the Hopwood family, who are believed to have settled on the land centuries before the hall was built and stayed for around 500 years. The hall was once famously visited by Lord Byron, who allegedly wrote his most famous poem within its walls.
The last two male heirs to Hopwood Hall were killed in World War I. Their devastated parents, who also lost 24 members of staff to the war, emigrated to Pennsylvania in the early 1920s where they founded a town named Hopwood. After a brief closure, Hopwood Hall became the management base of operations for the Lancashire Cotton Company, which made uniforms for World War II.
After another brief vacancy, the De La Salle Brothers Catholic order turned the hall into a teacher training college until the early 1990s, when the historic building fell into disrepair.
A Common Goal
Amid early restoration, Mr. DePree and one of the hall’s caretakers made an exciting discovery: a priest’s hole.
“We were rescuing a historic ceiling, and we spotted a little hole,” Mr. DePree said. “We shine a light up there, we could see it was a big place above the ceiling and later started to look into and realized this was a secret hiding place where priests in the 1600s, when Catholicism was a crime, were hiding to protect their lives. I must have been the first person to go in there in hundreds of years. We found an old tabernacle!
“It was amazing to me not only to find the priest’s hole space but also to actually find an old artifact still up there all those hundreds of years later.”
Any visitor to Hopwood Hall today will see “all sorts of things you would expect to see on a construction site,” said Mr. DePree, but will also see beautiful gardens boasting over 130 different varieties of plants, clean, safe rooms, and “a lot of progress.”
“I’ve made lifelong friends with many of them,” he told The Epoch Times. “We all are from different locations, different places, but yet we’re all bound by this common goal of rescuing the hall.
“Eventually we'll take on full responsibility for the building. We’re looking at the next three years, hopefully [to] be open by 2026, but we are planning to also keep sections of the hall open the entire time so that we can continue to engage the community.”
For Mr. DePree, whose childhood bedtime stories have become a lived reality, there’s an extra spark in Hopwood Hall’s restoration.
