The Dairy

Dairy Cottages and the adjoining Dairy/Creamery were built c.1870 for John Berners (1800 – 1886). The building has a date stone at the rear stating “1870”. They were originally built as a pair of semi-detached cottages to accommodate a “dairyman and a cowman” working for Squire Berners in his model Dairy. The Dairy itself was attached to the northern cottage by a corridor. This was all part of the Great Transformation design which included pairs of one-and-a-half storey “double-dweller” cottages along the Main Road, rebuilding the village school and probably the construction of a new Parsonage between 1869 and 1874.

The Dairy Cottages were accessed by a separate track, “Dairy Drift” which ran parallel to the Woolverstone Hall entrance and carriageway from the High Road. The buildings provided easy access to the dairy herd housed in the adjacent barn. The pair of cottages were converted into a single house c.1986 and have subsequently been remodelled, along with the cow sheds and extension, to provide boarding accommodation for Ipswich High School in 2019.

The cottages are of a two-storey construction with gabled ends and bays to the rear. They seek to imitate rural timber framed buildings, but the oak stud attached to the exterior is merely a facade. The cottages are made of red brick with white brick and ashlar dressings. The high-pitched gabled roof is constructed of plain tiles, except over the dairy, where banded fishtailed tiles are used. A contemporary comment compared them to “Swiss cottages” and another described them as “rustic”. Each cottage had five rooms and were accommodation for the dairyman and the cowman. Entry to the cottages was from the rear.

From the northernmost cottage there is a covered passageway leading to the polygonal dairy building itself which bears similarities, inside and out, to Queen Alexandra’s Dairy at Sandringham and, closer to home, the dairy at Easton Farm. The dairy building housed cooling, separating and bottling rooms associated with the herd of 20 Channel Island cows kept by John and Hugh Berners to supply rich creamy milk, butter and cheese. The skimmed milk was distributed to estate workers as a gift, one example of the generosity of the Squire. The dairy itself had a glazed tile floor, glazed tile walls, and marble shelves along with a centre table. An ingenious ventilation system, along with louvres, ensured that the dairy could be maintained at an optimum temperature. The fishtailed tiled roof with a mixture of dark and red tiles to create stripes, comes down over a narrow veranda designed to keep some of the summer heat away from the dairy itself by shading the windows.

“It is a charming looking place externally, embosomed in a well-wooded nook in the park. Inside, the appointments are of the most luxurious character. The benches and tables are of marble, massive and polished to a high degree. The place is small but there is nothing at any point which has been overlooked whether from the louvre windows and the verandas outside to temper the heat of the sun, or the interior arrangement of hot water piping to warm the place in winter. The walls are covered with glazed tiles and the floor is paved with a similar material” (The Ipswich Journal, 1874). 

The land on which Park Farm Dairy Cottages and Dairy were built, roughly two acres, was glebe land that had belonged to the church at Woolverstone and was the site of the former Parsonage and other buildings. However, in 1817, the then Rector, Rev. Henry Denny Berners swapped the glebe land with his older brother, Charles, for several parcels of land, across the Main Road, of more than 5 acres. This rationalised the boundary of the estate land, removing a pocket of outside ownership. Charles applied for a faculty from the Bishop of Norwich to demolish the old Rectory in 1819.

After the estate was sold in 1937, the cottages no longer housed the dairyman and cowman but were tenanted. At the time of the second Estate sale, in 1958, the south cottage was recorded as Woolverstone Police Station. This cottage was later bought by Mr and Mrs Kendrick who subsequently bought the neighbouring cottage adjoining the dairy when it became available following the death of Mrs E Snell. The Dairy Cottages became Dairy House. Mr Kendrick was a vet, with a practice in Ipswich, and ran an occasional evening surgery from his home for many years. All did not always go smoothly and the 1987 Great Storm wrought havoc across the estate and the grounds of Dairy House, here felling an oak tree across the Veterinary Clinic van.

Find out more at: https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1036942?section=official-list-entry