Former engine house built in 1906 to supply electricity to the now demolished Clumber Hall. It was later used as a laundry, and was converted into 2 dwellings in the 1950s. Footings of a small complex of buildings was uncovered during ground works outside the cottage. (1)

The first phase of use was as an estate power house, which appears to have left more traces in the archaeological record than the eponymous second phase did. The group of concrete blocks featuring apparent flywheel pits and mountings for heavy machinery, encountered in the central room, can confidently be assigned to this period, while the system of conduits or drains surrounding it and extending into the western room can also most convincingly be ascribed to the functions of the power house. The features encountered in the eastern room were more difficult to date, and only a possible flywheel pit seemed to be unequivocally associated with power generation. Fewer remains could be ascribed to the second phase, during which the building was used as a laundry. This weighting is inevitable in the western and central rooms, as the activities of drying and ironing laundry, which later documentation records as having taken place there, are unlikely to have left substantial sub-surface remains, and any excess water produced in the drying room could have been channelled into the extant water management network with a minimum of remodelling. The eastern room was identified as the washing room of the laundry, and the majority of substantial features could be associated with this function, as they seemed to be chiefly concerned with the heating, transport and disposal of water. However, if the original power house building was divided along the lines of the Herstmonceux installation into a battery room, engine room and boiler room, then it is
entirely plausible that this drainage network was originally associated with the power house phase, and that this room was adopted as the washing room of the laundry because a water heating and management system was already in place. In context, it is probably significant that very few finds were retrieved from this room, all of which were a rubble layer, while the western and central rooms produced quantities of modern refuse, chiefly associated with electrical engineering: this may suggest that the sub-surface features in these two rooms were back-filled and forgotten when the building was converted into a laundry, while the features in the eastern room continued in active use. Traces of the third, residential, phase of the building also survived in the form of four fireplaces, installed during the conversion of the buildings to two dwellings, and the footings of a grid of partition walls, identifiable on a recent plan of the building. (1)

Most of the features exposed during the external groundworks could be identified from old Ordnance Survey maps. The group of buildings encountered in the south-western corner of
the yard is shown on the 1st edition 25" map as comprising two discrete ranges, and this was borne out by the variation in building materials between structure 4008 and the remainder of
the group, which also indicates that the more easterly range was built later, as the common wall was of brick rather than stone. A flight of steps running up the inside of the eastern yard
wall also seemed to be featured on this map, as well as being identifiable from an archive photograph, while a free-standing rectangular building within the yard could be ascribed to
the first years of the twentieth century. A quantity of finds associated with early electricity generation, chiefly fragments of the glass insulators on which the battery cases would have
rested, were retrieved from the external groundworks, but all such finds came from the modern topsoil (appendix E). (1)

OS, 1919, 1:2500, County Series 1919 (Map). SNT1028.

<1> Network Archaeology, 2011, 67 and 68 Laundry Cottage, Clumber Park, Worksop Archaeological Watching Brief (Unpublished document). SNT4835.