Westholme House

Thomas Parry (1818−1879), an architect, builder and future Member of Parliament for Boston, had purchased the estate by 1846;[8][n 1] he employed his business partner and brother-in-law, Charles Kirk the younger, to design Westholme House on the site for him; their firm Kirk and Parry completed the mansion around 1849.[1][10][11][12] Parry moved in with his wife, mother and sister, and employed two servants; by 1871, two domestic workers had been added to his household.[13] Parry died in 1879 followed by his wife, Henrietta, in 1882.[14][15]

Henry Peake (1821–1886)[16] was occupying Westholme by 1885.[17] Peake was a solicitor who served as clerk to the county magistrates, and was a partner in the local law firm Peake, Snow and Peake, along with his son Henry Arthur Peake.[16][18] The partnership had connections with Kirk and Parry, and Peake married Eliza, a daughter of Charles Kirk the elder.[18][19] After his death, Peake's sons, George Herbert and Henry Arthur, successively occupied the house in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.[19][20][21] During the First World War, Henry Arthur and his wife, Alice Ann, lost three of their sons in battle.[22][n 2] In 1923, Henry Arthur died while staying at Hastings. He and his wife were planning to sell Westholme and move to Guildford before his death;[24] she did so and died there in 1933.[25] The businessman and Liberal politician Samuel Pattinson (1870–1942) lived at the house from at least 1924.[26][27] His wife, Betsy Sharpley Pattinson, also died in 1942 and their trustees auctioned off the furniture at Westholme two years later.[28][29]

Westholme was occupied by the military during the Second World War.[30] Kesteven County Council had acquired the property and its parkland by 1945 and proposed to use it for educational purposes.[31] The council wanted to convert the house into Kesteven County Library, but it had to wait for the War Department to agree to pay fees for "dilapidations" caused during its occupancy.[30][32] The Department provisionally agreed on £1,276 16s in 1947 and the library was operating at the house by 1949.[30][33] A Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) canteen at the site supplied school meals after the war;[34][35] and in 1947 the council bought a series of huts on the site from the War Department.[35] The parkland at Westholme was used as playing fields for students at the Secondary Modern in the late 1940s,[36] and the school acquired HORSA huts at Westholme to use as classrooms in the 1950s.[37] A metalwork room and sports pavilion were added and Westholme Lodge was also taken over by the school during that decade.[38][39][40]

Earlier post-war plans had envisaged a separate secondary modern for girls being built on the site and Kesteven and Sleaford High School being rebuilt there,[41][42] but in 1957 the County Council proposed building a new mixed secondary modern at Westholme instead.[43] By 1960, Sleaford Secondary Modern School was operating there alongside its original buildings on Church Lane.[44][45] In 1983, an extension to the Westholme block opened, allowing the school to close the old site; new teaching blocks were then built around the grounds. The school changed its name to St George's School in 1984, became a technology college in 1992 and converted to St George's Academy in 2010.[46][47] The house continued to be used as a library into the 1980s, but by the next decade, had become the school's sixth form base and an adult education centre.[48][49] As a result of major rebuilding work at St George's in 2011–12, a new sixth form centre opened and Westholme House was converted into the school's administrative centre.[50]