Hylton Castle

The Hylton family had been settled in England since the reign of King Athelstan in the tenth century. Lancelot de Hilton joined William the Conqueror's forces in 1066 but was killed at Faversham during the advance on London; in gratitude the king granted his eldest son, Henry, a tract of land on the River Wear, where Henry de Hilton built the first castle, probably of wood, in about 1072.

The stone castle that replaced it was raised by Sir William Hylton (1376–1435) as a four-storey, gatehouse-style fortified manor house comparable in plan to Lumley and Raby. No construction details survive, but twenty shields of arms above the west entrance help date the work: Sir Henry 'Hotspur' Percy quartered his arms with those of Lucy only from 1398, and the royal arms shown use the simplified French quartering Henry IV adopted around 1400, so the stone castle is believed to have been built between 1390 and the early fifteenth century. A household inventory of 1448 gives the building its first mention, simply as 'a gatehouse constructed of stone.'

Henry Hylton, de jure 12th Baron Hylton, left the castle on his death in 1641 to the City of London Corporation, to be used for charitable purposes for ninety-nine years; it returned to the family only after the Restoration, passing to his nephew John Hylton. Early in the eighteenth century, John Hylton (died 1712), second son of Henry Hylton, de jure 16th Baron Hylton, gutted the medieval interior to form a three-storeyed block with one room on each floor, fitted alternating pedimented sash windows in the Italianate style, and added a north wing shown in an engraving of 1728. His own second son, also John Hylton, added a matching south wing and crenellations to both wings after 1728, before dying without a male heir in 1746 as the last Baron Hylton.

The castle passed to a nephew, Richard Musgrave, who took the Hylton name, and was sold under a private Act of Parliament in 1749. It was bought by Lady Bowes, widow of Sir George Bowes of Streatlam and Gibside, and passed down to her grandson John Bowes, 10th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne. Under the Strathmores, Pietro La Francini, working for Daniel Garrett, decorated the wine and drawing rooms with stucco work that William Howitt, in his Visits to Remarkable Places of 1842, described as including one large scene that 'seemed to be Venus and Cupid, Apollo fiddling to the gods, Minerva in her helmet, and an old king'; Garrett probably also designed the Gothic porch added to the west entrance.

By 1812 the castle stood empty and decaying. The businessman Simon Temple leased it from the Strathmores that year, re-roofed the chapel for worship, added battlements to the wings and cultivated the gardens, but his failing business ventures left the work unfinished. Empty again by 1834, the castle briefly housed the Reverend John Wood's boarding school from 1840 — its pupils included Joseph Swan — before standing desolate once more; in January 1856 it was reported on fire while in the occupation of a farmer.

William Briggs, a local timber merchant and shipbuilder, bought the castle in 1862 and remodelled it to what he believed was more authentically medieval: he demolished the north and south wings, gutted the interior again, fitted cusp-headed windows, and moved the carved Hylton banner from above the west entrance to a flanking tower. His son, Colonel Charles James Briggs, inherited the castle in 1871.

After Colonel Briggs' death in 1900, the castle passed to the Wearmouth Coal Company in about 1908 and later to the National Coal Board. Engulfed by Sunderland's expanding housing estates in the 1940s, it was vandalised and stripped of its lead roof before the Ministry of Works took the castle and chapel into state care in 1950 under threat of demolition. English Heritage took over the site, Grade I listed since 1949, in 1984, and in 2016 the Heritage Lottery Fund awarded £2.9 million and Sunderland Council £1.5 million towards turning the castle into a community facility and visitor attraction.