About the House
A short account of the bookseller’s house above Evermoor Brook, the Trust that keeps it, and the curators who carry the day — written by the Trust each March and revised on the wall in the vestibule.
The Bookseller’s House
Evermoor House was built in the spring and summer of 1844 on a steep red-sandstone shoulder above Evermoor Brook in south Shropshire, by Edmund Throckton (1789–1873), a London bookseller of Paternoster Row who had retired from the trade at fifty-four after twenty-eight years in the shop. The land was bought from the Plowden estate by deed of January 1844 and the house was raised through that summer by a yard of masons working under the direction of John Marsh of Bishop’s Castle.
The library room on the south front was finished in October 1845 with ceiling-high oak shelves cut from the long-coppice at Plowden, and the first volumes — some four thousand of them, brought up from London by waggon in twelve carts — were on the shelves before Christmas of that year. The Throckton circulating library lent across the country families of the Marches for seventy-nine years, until Edmund’s grandson Henry Throckton wound the lending business up in 1923 and moved the residual collection to a shopfront on Pride Hill in Shrewsbury, where it ran on as Throckton & Co. until the shop was bombed in November 1940.
The Evermoor Trust
The freehold of the property passed through the Throckton family until 1958 and through two tenancies thereafter, before the Evermoor Trust was constituted as a charitable body of four trustees and the freehold was acquired from the late Henry Throckton’s estate by deed of June 1965. The Trust undertook the structural restoration between 1966 and 1968 under the direction of the master-of-works Margaret Throckton (a great-great-niece of the bookseller, and chair of the Trust to this day), opened the hotel to its first guests in 1972, and has held the house in trust without interruption since.
The four trustees in office at present are Margaret Throckton (chair, 1972–), Henry Vavasour (1980–), Beatrice Wellsworth (1984–), and Crispin Hadley (1996–). The Trust meets each March on the anniversary of the library closing to settle the year’s standing register, review the duty curator’s notes, and rewrite the borrowing register if any answer has changed.
The Duty Curator
The day-to-day running of the hotel is carried by the duty curator, a salaried position held in turn by three members of the working staff, each on a fortnight’s rota. The curator carries the keys, keeps the standing register, opens and closes the reading room on the days the room is opened, and writes a short evening note that is held in the small bookcase at the head of the south stair. The note is read by the next curator, by the trustees in March, and by no one else.
The curator’s working spine of the house is the south stair: keys are passed at the half-landing, the morning post is sorted on the lower step where the south light falls best, and the standing register is held in the bookcase above. The curator does not entertain guests in the reading room and does not play.
A Restored Library
The Reading Room was returned to use in March 2017 after a four-year programme of conservation work. The original Plowden oak boards were lifted, cleaned, and re-laid; the ceiling-high library shelves of 1845 were stabilised and left in place along the seaward wall, kept polished and unstocked since the books were taken to Shrewsbury in 1923; the long-wall windows south over the brook were re-leaded and re-glazed; and the small reading nook by the south door was restored to its 1845 form for the use of guests of the hotel and their families.
The room is a feature of the hotel and not its purpose. It is opened by the duty curator from seven in the evening until midnight on the days the curator judges it suitable, and is closed at the curator’s discretion or at any guest’s request. The hotel does not host wagers, hold accounts, or operate as a gambling platform; the room is presented as a restored library within a working country house hotel.