The Deanery, Wolverhampton

The Deanery, also known as the Old Deanery and the Deanery Hall, was a manor house along Wulfruna Street, Wolverhampton in England. The Wulfruna Building of the University of Wolverhampton occupies the site today.

History

The first Deanery building along Wulfruna Street was constructed after a charter was granted between 1100 and 1108 by Henry I, who provided a dwelling house and 40 acres of land in Wolverhampton to support the local clergy. In 1480, it was allied with the Deanery of St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle.

Richard Best acquired the Deanery during the early 1650s and began demolishing the first Deanery in 1657, completing the construction of the Old Deanery using red bricks in 1667. William Wood then leased the property between 1692 and 1713 and he lived there with his wife Margaret as they raised fourteen children there. It first appears on a map of Wolverhampton published by Thomas Jeffreys and Isaac Taylor in 1751.

By 1833, it was a ladies' boarding school, and the administrative union with the Deanery at Windor Castle ended in 1846, when the Collegiate Establishment of Wolverhampton was formally dissolved upon the death of Dean Henry Lewis Hobart, leading to the church's integration into the Diocese of Lichfield. In 1877, it became a Conservative Club, and between 1904 and 1914, it was the headquarters of the local Royal Army Medical Corps. It was left in a state of disrepair by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners after 1914, and after a bid to save the Old Deanery from demolition failed, it was purchased by the Wolverhampton Corporation during the early 1920s and was demolished in 1925.

The Old Deanery was replaced by the Wolverhampton Municipal Technical College (today the Wulfruna Building), which opened on 21 May 1926 and was replaced in 1932.