Future of 'Downton Shabby' to be decided at trial

A former US film-maker's High Court battle with a council over control of the ancestral stately home he spent seven years trying to restore will take place during a two-day trial.

Hopwood DePree has led work to rescue Hopwood Hall in Middleton, Greater Manchester, since 2017, and said he had complied with an agreement with Rochdale Borough Council that gave him the option to buy the building for £1 when planning permission was secured.

But the council argued he had not met the terms of the deal, and locked him out in November 2024.

At an initial hearing on Monday, district judge Nathan Banks said the trial would take place in April.

Rochdale Borough Council's representative Geraint Wheatley asked that the trial should take place over the two days because of the amount of evidence put forward by DePree.

He said there were several paragraphs in DePree's witness statement that were "ripe for scrutiny" and would require cross examination.

Fifteen former members of the community group Friends of Hopwood Hall also attended the interim hearing at Manchester Civil Justice Centre.

The group was disbanded after the council took over the project in November 2024.

Two years before, DePree had published a book called Downton Shabby, about his efforts to restore the hall.

He said that when he was growing up in Michigan, his grandfather told him stories of "Hopwood Castle". But he only discovered the real hall existed while researching his family history in 2013.

He moved to the UK to spearhead the effort to save and restore it, signing the deal with the council in 2017.

DePree began work on the crumbling building and got planning permission in 2022 to refurbish it as an event and hospitality venue.

He claims to have spent £750,000 of his own money on the project.

But he says relations soured when the council's Rochdale Development Agency became more involved in 2024.

DePree's legal case accuses the agency of trying to "poison everything my team and I had worked so hard to achieve".

He claims the council stopped co-operating and went behind his back, and that its conduct had been "evasive, misleading and at times shocking".

The council has previously said any sale would depend on DePree having "a commercially viable business model to secure the long term future of the hall".

Last November, the council said it had decided not to renew the option agreement after consultants said his plans were "unlikely to be able to secure future public or private funding".

At that time, a council spokesman said DePree "had not been able to produce a viable proposal... despite having had seven years to do so".

The authority said it "had a responsibility to explore alternative options" to "protect the public monies invested to date".

At that point the council said it spent £557,000 between 2017 and 2024 for essential repairs, with almost £1m contributed by Historic England.

The council said it was now spending a further £700,000 on roof repairs and a feasibility study.

According to DePree's legal documents, the council has also argued that the planning permission was insufficient to meet the terms for a sale under the agreement.

DePree disputes the claim, and the council's claim that he needed a viable business model as part of the deal.

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