What a glass act!
Written byJo Davison on behalf of Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust
Published on21 May 2026
Wentworth Woodhouse’s volunteers get stuck in and cut £20,000 from Georgian window repair bill.
Six volunteers at Wentworth Woodhouse (external link) (opens in new tab) have taken the ‘pane’ out of what would have been a costly renovation project …
They stepped up to help repair Georgian sash windows at the Rotherham mansion’s Stables block - and have saved Wentworth Woodhouse Preservation Trust over £20,000.
The Trust is part-way through a£35 million restoration of its huge, Grade I listed Stables complex, which was the biggest and grandest in the land when it was completed in 1783.
The restoration is being carried out in phases based on a long-term development masterplan, with the timetable dependent upon when funding can be found for each phase.
The southern half of the West Range, which will eventually house a cafe, now has a new roof and ceiling, improved insulation, repaired doors and the stone walls repaired and re-pointed. But the Trust’s funds couldn’t stretch to repairs for its 250 year-old windows.
The 10 original sashes, made from English oak, include nine with bow-tops and two with unusual cast iron top sashes. Their longevity is a testament to Georgian joinery skills and the quality of materials the Marquess of Rockingham insisted on. But while some were in relatively good condition, others were badly rotten.
The southern half of the West Range, which will eventually house a cafe, now has a new roof and ceiling, improved insulation, repaired doors and the stone walls repaired and re-pointed. But the Trust’s funds couldn’t stretch to repairs for its 250 year-old windows.
The 10 original sashes, made from English oak, include nine with bow-tops and two with unusual cast iron top sashes. Their longevity is a testament to Georgian joinery skills and the quality of materials the Marquess of Rockingham insisted on. But while some were in relatively good condition, others were badly rotten.
The Trust asked its maintenance volunteers if anyone was prepared to put in the elbow-grease, strip the windows of 250 years of paint and grime so that a skilled joiner could carry out the repairs and then prime, undercoat and paint them.
There was a resounding yes from Steve Woodhouse, Mark Dyson, Martin Brook, Paul Pharro, Martin Wainwright and James Clarke.
Said WWPT maintenance manager George Gomery-Emerton: “The WWPT maintenance dept consists of two people and I’m one of them. There is so much to do here, we could not manage without our volunteers.”
The volunteers are all retirees. There’s a former miner, a car mechanic, a heating engineer, a brick specialist, an IT retail manager, a Chartered Structural Engineer, a senior manager at British Gas, a retired GP and a Territorial Army Warrant officer.
“They have a wide range of skills and interests and they share a passion for fixing things and supporting Wentworth Woodhouse.” added George. “Sanding and stripping old woodwork is laborious work, but they got stuck in.”
Their task began last September, working alongside a contracted heritage joiner from Sheffield. The joiner took the windows out so the volunteers could work on them in an indoor workshop.
The joiner sourced the correct seasoned and native oak, wherever possible, from South Yorkshire sawmills to carry out the repairs and the volunteers stripped centuries of cracked paintwork to get the frames back to bare wood. As they did so, numerous old repairs carried out over the centuries were revealed.
After a bespoke assessment of each window, the joiner cut out rotten wood and spliced in new, and re-glazed broken glass panels. The volunteers’ next task was re-sanding, priming and repainting.
Five restored windows are back in situ and the volunteers are fitting their sash cords and weights. The other five windows will be completed and re-fitted in July.
Said George: “Our volunteers showed huge dedication. They set up a whatsapp group to organise a roster and prioritise tasks. Each man worked around three days a week, entirely unpaid, through some pretty foul weather outdoors and some very low temperatures in the workshop - there were days when it was so cold, they were in four layers of clothes.
“Their hard work has saved the Trust £20,000 and we think they will be saving us even more in the future. They learned so much from working alongside the joiner, the mansion’s maintenance team can confidently ask them to work on other original windows around the Wentworth Woodhouse site.
We want to enable more and more maintenance work to be done in-house, which upskills people and saves the Trust money.”
The Trust began the first stage of The Stables project in summer 2023. This work is funded with £4.61 million of the Government’s £20 million Levelling Up investment in Rotherham, which was secured by Rotherham Council to help improve the town’s leisure economy and skills. Historic England has provided £500,000 of partnership funding, bringing the total invested in this project to £5.11 million.’
