Nostalgia: Burton Villa – a house through time

Introduction

In the heart of Brixham, just off Burton Street, stands a house that has outlasted its builders, its families, and even the town that once surrounded it. Burton Villa is not just a building; it is a mirror of Brixham itself — a tale of ambition, grandeur, continuity, decline, and memory. For more than two centuries its walls have absorbed the lives of shipowners, bankers, widows, spinsters, servants, holidaymakers, and tenants. To walk past it today, weathered and sagging, is to pass a monument to an entire town’s changing fortunes.

This is the story of Burton Villa: a house through time.

The Dream of William Green (1810s–1850s)

Burton Villa began as a vision. In the early 1800s, Brixham was a port of nets, trawlers, and salt-stained cottages. Architectural elegance was rare, yet William Gillard, born 1785, had a taste for design. He created several homes in the fashionable cottage orné style — Gothic windows, neat proportions, ornamental touches. Among them was Burton Villa.

But Gillard built on land owned by William Green, a shipowner of considerable means. Green was no ordinary Brixham mariner; he married into the Vitterys, a banking dynasty, and thus brought together two of the town’s wealthiest families. In 1842, census records place the Greens at “Burton Cottage,” as the Villa was then known. By 1851, they were firmly established in their new home: thirteen rooms, gardens sweeping across two acres, and servants tending to the family’s daily needs.

To live at Burton Villa was to declare not only comfort but class. In a town where most men hauled nets from the sea, William Green owned ships. The Villa stood as a statement of permanence in an age of uncertainty.

Maria’s Widowhood and Susan’s Long Reign (1870s–1910s)

When William Green died in the 1860s, his widow Maria presided over the Villa. Many widows of Victorian Brixham slipped into dependency; Maria, daughter of the powerful Vittery family, did not. She maintained her home with quiet dignity, supported by her children and astonishingly loyal servants — women who stayed with the family for decades, one for forty years.

Her daughter, Susan Vittery Green, became the embodiment of continuity. Born in 1845, Susan lived her entire life within the Villa. By 1911 she was still there, middle-aged, presiding with three servants over the great rooms her father had built. Neighbours came to regard her as permanent as the house itself.

As Brixham modernised — terraces rising for fishermen, chapels for Methodists, the railway pushing close — Burton Villa remained aloof. Its shutters still opened each morning; fires still glowed in its hearths. Susan walked the same gardens she had known as a child. When she died in 1927, a spinster at eighty-two, she left behind not only a house but nearly a century of family memory embedded in stone and timber.

The Adams Years and the 1954 Auction

After Susan’s death, Burton Villa passed to William Grant Adams, retired excise officer and grandson by marriage of William and Maria Green. Thus, remarkably, the house remained in the extended family for over a hundred years.

By the 1930s the house still retained its grandeur: oak-panelled hall, drawing room, sunny lounge, barns, stables, greenhouse, and fruit orchards. Yet the age of great households was waning. Servants were scarce, maintenance expensive, and post-war Britain looked towards smaller, suburban homes.

In 1954, Lloyds Bank prepared Burton Villa for auction. The particulars read like a farewell to another age:

“One of Brixham’s distinguished residences, enjoying a southerly aspect… with an air of refinement and quiet dignity.”

Each room was described in detail, from oak-surrounded fireplaces to the leaded glass porch. The grounds stretched to two acres, with barns, cobbled yards, and a pine-built garage for two cars. Yet even the catalogue hinted at decline, suggesting the house might serve “as a guesthouse, nursing home, or for conversion.”

The auction was held at Jill’s Restaurant, Bolton Cross, on 20th October 1954. Bidders gathered, gavel poised. When the hammer fell, something ended: more than a century of Green and Vittery presence was over. Burton Villa was no longer legacy; it was transaction.

Decline, Division, and Memory (1960s–2025)

What followed was a story familiar across Britain. In the 1960s Burton Villa was divided: part remained a residence, but five holiday flats were carved from its grand rooms. Tourists unpacked their suitcases where shipowners had once entertained bankers. Children played on the lawns, unaware of the spinster who had walked there a lifetime before.

The division kept the house alive. Where many similar homes were demolished, Burton Villa survived by adapting. Yet with every decade its character softened. Gardens shrank, outbuildings crumbled, the surrounding land was developed. By the 1980s, it was once more on the market, advertised for its potential as flats.

By 2025, Burton Villa still stood, but its grandeur had faded. The verandah sagged; plaster cracked; windows stared blankly, some shuttered, some broken. Surrounded now by modern houses of Burton Villa Close, it looked like a relic — diminished, yet still proud.

For passers-by it might seem sad. But to those who know its history, every wall whispers: William and Maria Green hosting dinners; loyal servants lighting fires; Susan Vittery Green walking the garden paths; the auctioneer’s gavel falling in 1954; holidaymakers arriving in the 1960s.

Epilogue

The story of Burton Villa is the story of Brixham itself. Built on maritime wealth, sustained by family legacy, challenged by modernity, it has endured storms, wars, and decline. It began in ambition, thrived in permanence, adapted in necessity, and now lingers in memory.

Perhaps that is the fate of all houses: to outlast their builders, to shelter generations, to hold echoes of laughter and sorrow, and finally to stand alone, their stories known only to those who care to listen.

Burton Villa waits in that silence — a house whose story is long, rich, and deeply human.