Thirsk Hall

Thirsk Hall is home to the Thirsk Hall Sculpture Garden. We opened the Sculpture Garden in 2021 and we are delighted to share our garden with the community and wider public. The garden is open to the public Wednesday – Saturday each week. The house is currently the home of Daisy & Bill and their three young boys.

The Hall itself is a grade II* listed three-storey town house built in 1723, and extended in the 1770s by none other than York architect John Carr. The house is unique in its setting – to the east of the house it sits in the town of Thirsk and out of the west door (to the rear) there are 20 acres of gardens, walled paddocks and a parkland – we have our very own ‘secret garden’, as many of our visitors have remarked.

As a grade II* listed property, the house is designated as of national importance and is deemed as of more than special interest to the cultural and historical heritage of the UK. Over three hundred years and twelve generations later the Bell family still occupy the house and gardens. A family of Yeomans and mercers, not high born, who became MPs for Thirsk and Justices of the Peace during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The architecture of the house is in itself significant, as both its Queen Ann history sits neatly alongside Carr’s Palladian extensions. A fortuitous marriage and a healthy dowry made the evolution of the house possible, during a period when visiting and sociability was paramount in the social calendars of a fashionable, up and coming young married couple. The changing features of the house from its original form through to Carr’s extension are visible throughout, and offer an incredible architectural history of the period.