Sizewell Hall is a Christian conference centre in Sizewell on the Suffolk coast, England. It is owned by the Ogilvie family. It was for some time the home of a progressive school. It has historic connections with a classic taxidermy collection.
The Hall is currently a Christian conference centre run by Sizewell Hall Ltd, a Registered Charity. In 2007 6500 visitors came to stay at the Hall. These groups consist of local church groups from East Anglia, national organisations and a local youth organisation CYM from Ipswich. CYM has developed an activity holiday for school children in the African Village in the Hall grounds.
The Ogilvie family purchased the property in 1859 and expanded the estate to more than 6,000 acres (24 km2), and extended the house. Mrs Margaret Ogilvie was a benefactress who established a research award (Readership in ophthalmology) at Oxford University From this house, not far from RSPB Minsmere, the ophthalmic surgeon Fergus Menteith Ogilvie (1861–1918) formed the very large Collection of British Birds which, in a celebrated partnership with the taxidermist Thomas Gunn of Norwich, were mounted in cases with unusually beautiful simulated habitats. The collection (now in Ipswich Museum) is considered the best of its kind in Great Britain. The Hall was rebuilt after a fire in 1920. Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie developed nearby Thorpeness. The Ogilvie family moved out when the army commandeered the hall in World War II.
After the War, it became a private school run by Harry Tuyn. One of his famous students was Sheridan Morley. The school closed in the late 1950s. The school was a progressive, co-educational establishment where pupils could study what they liked, if they liked. (It is not to be confused with the progressive Summerhill School at Leiston nearby). It was said that subjects such as Geography, Maths and Latin were not taught at all on the ground that they were too boring. However this cannot be true, because it was a copy of Kennedy's Latin Primer from Sizewell Hall School which gave to Benjamin Britten and Myfanwy Piper the words for Miles's Latin benedicite in Britten's opera The Turn of the Screw.
In the 1960s the Hall was the headquarters for Taylor Woodrow as they were constructing Sizewell A nuclear power Station.
Sizewell Hall was used as a location for the television adaptation of The Lost Prince and for Lovejoy.
The grounds of the hall also include the camping site, a children's park, tennis courts, a sport's hall, squash court and activity course.
Read more about Sizewell Hall: External Links
Famous quotes containing the word hall:
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)