The Ridge was designed in 1896 and built in 1899 for Robert Frank Valiance FRIBA, a Mansfield architect, to his own design. He is first listed in the 1900 electoral register at that address, and died there in 1908. His only daughter, Mary, continued to live there until c.1918. The property passed out of private ownership in March 1950 when it was bought by Nottinghamshire County Council, and converted to a children's home, opening in November 1951. Lochbuie, a similarly large house with stables, was also designed by Robert Valiance and his partner, Louis Westwick, in 1907 for a Mr R.H.Wiggins, and built soon afterwards. (1)

The houses in the Park and Park Avenue were built between 1891 and 1912, on land belonging to the Manor of Mansfield for prominent local people. Of these residences, The Ridge and Lochbuie, situated on the brow of a hill, are the best examples. Lochbuie comprises two storeys with an attic storey in the large decorated Tudor gable on the cross-wing. It has a recessed cen-tral porch with Mansfield stone columns, the capitals carved with simple classical motifs, and above it carved stone volutes, brackets and swags, with a charming naturalistic face of a young girl in the centre of the composition. To the right of the entrance is a curious canted bay that pro-jects through the roof line, and to the right of that, black-and-white close studding on the first floor, with a canted bay with stone mullions on the ground floor. The tall red brick chimneys have Shavian decorative brick corbelling. The Ridge has a double height entrance hail with two turreted bay windows linked at first floor level by a wooden verandah. The adjacent coach house/stable block has steeply pitched, red tiled roofs. (1)

Standing in extensive grounds with mature trees, these houses stand out in the conservation area, which otherwise comprises smaller semi-detached houses of the 1870s and 1880s built of Mansfield stone, Midland Imperial red brick, and slate roofs, and mock-Tudor houses of the 1920s, much 'im-proved' in recent years. But Lochbuie and The Ridge were the forerunners of these; large detached houses with coach houses, in an eclectic English vernacular style revived by George Devey in the 1 860s (for example, in the estate buildings at I-Iemsted Park, Benenden, Kent for the Earl of Cran-brook). The style in the Mansfield houses is less confidently handled, perhaps, than by Devey or Richard Norman Shaw, but nevertheless instantly recognisable as the style popular at the turn of the century and later. The houses are - reminiscent, too, of the work of Noftingham architect Watson Fothergill (1841-1928), whose style was 'an idiosyncratic combination of polychrome Gothic and half-timbering." Fothergill's offices in George Street, Nottingham (1894-5), and the Queens Chambers, Long Row, Nottingham (1897), were both clearly an inspiration to Valiance, with their eclectic mix of octagonal castellated tower, half-timbered gables with carved barge boards, brick banding and oriel windows characterising the architecture. Unfortunately, The Ridge has an ugly and unsympathetic 1970s extension, which could be removed. Lochbuie may have orig-inal features inside. Plans have survived for both buildings and could be used to aid restoration. (1)

The Architect: Robert Frank Valiance (1856-1908) was born in Mansfield, the son of George Valiance, of Cavendish House in that town. [He] was appointed a governor and honorary archi-tect of the Mansfield and Mansfield Woodhouse hospitals. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1891, and became President of the Society of Architects in 1907. - Valiance died at his house, The Ridge, on 18 April 1908 and was buried in Mansfield cemetery.
Valiance's contribution to the institutional buildings in the Mansfield area was considerable, and other surviving examples of his work there are yet to be fully identified. It was the town where he lived all his life, to which he was clearly deeply attached, and on behalf of which he carried out much public service. For this historical reason, as well as the considerable intrinsic architec-tural quality of The Ridge and Lochbuie, every effort should be made by the local authority to retain these key buildings in The Park Conservation Area in Mansfield. (1)

<1> English Heritage, 2002, Lochbuie and The Ridge The Park, Mansfield (Unpublished document). SNT5233.