The house was built in the 1770s by the Kerrich family, successful brewers who had built up a collection of some forty pubs along the Waveney Valley, together with farmland and maltings on the Norfolk side. The site had previously been built on, and late bronze age artefacts and jewellery found when digging the foundations were sent to the British Museum and to Norwich Museum. While the house was under constructions the son of the family was sent on the grand tour to collect suitable art.
The family fortunes gained a further boost when John Kerrich married Eleanor Fitzgerald, whose mother was one of the richest commoners in Britain during the nineteenth century. Her brother, Edward Fitzgerald the poet, was a regular visitor to the house, for Eleanor was his favourite sister. He left her eldest son a large bequest which was spent in the 1880s on complete remodelling of the house and gardens. The front door was moved to the east side, and the driveways altered; the main staircase was rebuilt in the new entrance hall, and the rear service wings connected to the main block of the house. The attics were screened by a Soanian half storey wall which made the house look more classical. Despite all this work, including the construction of a large winter garden on the west side of the house, the family did not move back into it, but remained in a smaller house at Dunburgh nearby where they had moved during the renovations. Instead they let the Hall to a series of tenants, up to and through the Great War, during which the young men of the Kerrich family were killed. The family’s memorials are in Geldeston Church, which had been repaired and extended by them in the nineteenth century.
The two old aunts who were left to run the house mortgaged it to a neighbour, who foreclosed on them in the early 1930s. The new owner continued to let it, and during the Second World War Taverham School rented it, building a useful air-raid shelter in the garden. General Sir Charles Lloyd rented it between 1946-71, and his wife decorated the house and developed the garden into the structure that it retains to this day. Their tenancy was followed by that of a sixth-form crammer, and it then passed by gift to a new owner before being for the first time put on the open market in 1990. By the time the present owners took it on the interior, although recently redecorated, suffered from rampant dry rot, and the grounds had been rather let go, offering a renovation project that despite constant attention seems never to be quite finished. In removing some of the 1880s additions the original form of the house has been restored, including the attic dormers. A 1980s porch was removed and replaced by a modern classical one designed by Julian Bicknell, together with some remodelling of the south front.
Geldeston Hall 