The Old Music Hall and Vaughn's mansion

In 2009-2010 the directors of McMillan & Holder were involved in the early stages of stone masonry work to restore Vaughn’s Mansion and the Music hall in Shrewsbury. Working with Paul Arrowsmith a prominent and highly experienced local stone mason, we were contracted by Grooms builders. Grooms are often involved in the most prestigious of Shropshire’s restoration projects.

Vaughn’s mansion is on Norman  footings and believed to have been built in the 1200s . It is one of only a handful of early medieval defensive hall houses remaining in the UK. The stone masons were required to sensitively restore and remove all modern introductions into the medieval fabric of the building such as the concrete from the1960s boiler room, the concrete fire doors and parts of the concrete nuclear bunker. We then had to reintroduce red sand stone blocks of masonry, dressed in the Norman herringbone style with an half inch punch. Once we had reintroduced the masonry in the same age, classification, colour and grain as the existing Norman masonry, with the same medieval dressing marks from the stone mason’s chisel and in a sympathetic lime mortar, we achieved an almost seamless transition from original masonry to the new. It was odd that the greatest compliment which we could receive from the architects and historic building inspectors was that they could not tell which parts we had done anew.

The new public buildings house an historic museum collection, together with visitor services and information centre.

Gallery