Wyfold Court

The house was designed by George Somers Leigh Clarke for the Lancashire cotton magnate and Conservative politician Edward Hermon and was built between 1874 and 1884.^[1]

Wyfold Court has a 14 window range of non-uniform material, mostly of stone mullion and transom windows with "elaborate carved hoods".^[1] The building is built of scarlet brick with blue brick diapers (geometric patterns) and yellow stone details.^[3] Its style combines the Flamboyant period of French Gothic architecture with a touch of Scots Baronial.^[3] The front façade has towers with corner turrets, gargoyles and traceried windows; its garden front has mullioned bay windows and brick gable (facing roof walls) with crocketed heraldic beasts.^[3] Indoors, the main corridor is rib vaulted with staircase hall and a multi-storey wide bay window with stained glass of royal coats of arms.^[3] In the 1970s critic Jennifer Sherwood summarised its architecture as a "Nightmare Abbey".^[3]

Hermon's only daughter was Frances Caroline Hermon who married Robert Hodge. Hodge secured a seat in the Commons at the 1895 general election as MP for the Southern or Henley Division of Oxfordshire.^[4] He was created a baronet as Sir Robert Hodge of Wyfold Court in July 1902^[5] and later ennobled as Baron Wyfold in May 1919.^[6]

After his wife died in 1929, Hodge had little use for such a large house and, in 1932, he sold it to the Government who converted it for medical use as Borocourt Hospital.^[1] It joined the National Health Service in 1948.^[7] In 1981 Silent Minority, a documentary film made by Nigel Evans for ATV, highlighted the conditions of mental patients at the Borocourt Hospital and at St Lawrence's Hospital in Caterham.^[8]

After the introduction of Care in the Community in the 1980s the hospital reduced in size and closed in 1993.^[7] By the year 2000, it was returned to residential use as apartments.^[9]