Underley Hall

Underley Hall in 1879, from A Series of Picturesque Views of Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland, by Francis Orpen Morris.

Underley Hall is a large country house near Kirkby Lonsdale in Cumbria. It was designed in a Jacobean Revival style by the architect George Webster for Alexander Nowell and built between 1825 and 1828, on the site of an earlier house. An additional wing and tower, designed by E. G. Paley and Hubert Austin, were added in 1874.

After being used as a school between 1940 and 1959, the property became St Michael's College, a junior seminary for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Lancaster, for which a modernist chapel was designed by George Grenfell-Baines of architecture practice BDP and constructed between 1964 and 1966.

In 1976 the building changed hands again, becoming an independent residential special school for teenagers with behavioural difficulties. The school closed in July 2014

Further reading

• John D. Battle, ed. (1969), Underley Hall, A History of the House and its Occupants