riding school & stables
The stable block and riding school was built 1815-19 while the Abbey was owned by James Henry Leigh. He commissioned a local architect, Birmingham-born Charles Samuel Smith, who had built up a practice in the rapidly expanding Leamington Spa where he designed the Pump Room (1813-14), the Regent Hotel and the upper Assembly Rooms (since demolished). These are, or were, in the classical style, but the stable block at Stoneleigh is in Tudor-Gothic, chosen no doubt to allude to the origins of the house as a sixteenth-century private residence.
Built of local red sandstone, it embodied major changes in stable-design which followed the growing popularity of thoroughbred racing horses in the late eighteenth century, with loose-boxes, accommodation for grooms and a spacious riding-house for indoor horsemanship, complete with a gallery from which the horses could be observed by visitors to the house. The stables themselves are arranged in a semi-circle, inspired by the stables at Belvoir Castle, in Leicestershire, which Smith had seen, with coach houses occupying the building in the chord of the arc and the riding house next to the entrance, which is surmounted by a crenellated tower. The picture below, by John James Brandard in circa 1830, shows the inner cobbled courtyard.
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