The US actor at war with Rochdale council over his ‘ancestral home’

Hopwood DePree’s project to restore a Rochdale manor house hangs in the balance after funding issues led the council to pull out of the deal

Hopwood DePree strolls up to the imposing doorway that serves as the grand entrance to what was once his ancestral home.
The American director and actor isn’t about to play Lord of the Manor, though. For starters, he’s in work boots and has just walked through some fierce industrial fencing, the colour of which matches the grey autumnal skies near Rochdale.
“Welcome to Hopwood Hall,” he beams, almost incongruously, given the Grade II-listed manor house is, basically, derelict. “Honestly, it fills me with so much emotion every time I’m here, thinking about this place which has been in my family for so many years.”
Except, DePree can’t really do anything apart from gesticulate wildly. He doesn’t actually own Hopwood Hall, and has never lived there. In fact, there’s been a padlock on its medieval door since May as a result of a health and safety ruling, meaning he hasn’t been inside since then. “I mean, I could go inside, I have a key,” whispers DePree. “But local people have put a lot of time and effort into this project and I want to do this respectfully.”
The project the 54-year-old speaks of – to fully restore this place to its former glory – is now as insecure as some of the roof. After years of work and hundreds of thousands of pounds invested to make Hopwood Hall safe and accessible for the community, during which time DePree had an agreement with Rochdale Council on an option to buy the building for a nominal fee (if he could produce a commercially viable business model and planning permission) – the Council ended their relationship last week.
Authorities said Mr DePree did not have a “viable” plan for the future of the 60-room country house. On Friday, the council served a vacate order on him. His lawyers are considering their next steps. But DePree is unequivocal – he feels the council “pulled the rug from under him by jettisoning their agreement, leaving his dreams of converting it into an arts and events centre in ruins.
For now, just like everyone else, the star of The Last Big Attraction and producer of Jennifer Connolly and Ed Harris’ movie Virginia has to peer through the newly restored leaded windows on the ground floor and wonder what might have been.
“These were all boarded up or had big metal grates on when I first came here,” points out DePree. “In fact the whole hall was being vandalised on a regular basis, there was water running down the walls, vines growing out the windows…
“But we had heritage skills training classes, and people in this community have built these windows. Many more to do, of course. But yeah, we must have done 200 of them now.”
Hopwood Hall was in the Hopwood family for 500 years (DePree’s direct ancestor John Hopwood lived there in the 17th century) until the early 20th century, when its two male heirs were killed in World War I and their grieving parents moved to London, eventually selling the estate to the Lancashire Cotton Corporation. It changed hands a few more times in the years that followed, before Rochdale Council bought it in the early 1990s.
Even through its cobwebbed windows, you do get a sense of the potential of the property, where Lord Byron and Guy Fawkes are said to have stayed in centuries gone by. Peering through the high ceilinged room that DePree envisages as one of the public spaces for historical tours that he hoped would form part of a community hospitality and events venue – he says Alnwick Castle is a major inspiration as a business model – you can see the grand central courtyard.
The light, airy space overlooking the gardens would make for a lovely reading room or library. The problem, however, is that there’s no floor in it – even though a National Lottery Heritage Grant was awarded earlier this year for remedial works to make the ground floor rooms accessible again for community tours.
DePree shakes his head wistfully. “I just want to save this building – not for me, but for the community. There’s a major passion from everyone to get Hopwood Hall back into public use.”
And that has always been the dream for DePree, who is originally from Michigan. He first came to the town of Middleton in 2013, driven by intrigue after hearing stories from relatives of a “castle in England” that his direct family had left behind for America in the 1700s.
One visit to an ancestry website later, he was on the plane to England. DePree fell in love with Hopwood Hall instantaneously, despite its downtrodden state and unremarkable location around the back of a sprawling further education college. Local historians told DePree they thought it had five to ten years left before it fell into complete ruin. It remains on the Historic Buildings At Risk register.
“It was a complete wreck,” DePree admits. “But I was still so moved by the history of the building. The sheer beauty of it – hand-carved wooden figurines and cherubs in the walls, a ceremonial marriage plaque carved in 1689. The caretaker took me into this room full of mould where they said my 14 times great grandfather would have been, and I was, like, ‘right I have to do something here’.
“My family in the US felt the same, and at that point it was about fundraising from afar. Then I got involved with Rochdale Council to try and spearhead a project to restore the building – it was going to be a lot of effort – but eventually I said, you know, if I know about this problem and I don’t do anything, I would feel terrible.”
Meanwhile, DePree sold his house and poured what he says has been hundreds of thousands of pounds – “£581,000, last time I checked” – into the beginnings of a rescue effort for the hall, funding staff for the community engagement programme, and the formation of the Hopwood Foundation charity.
“Me and my sister have written a lot of grant funding applications,” he says.
The Lottery award in early 2024 was the first to be granted directly to the Hopwood Foundation and brought with it a sense that forward momentum was finally being achieved.
But months on, the problem of funding remains. Even DePree himself estimates that up to £13m will need to be raised to get this building back to its former glory. And, with the best will in the world, he’s not a Hollywood A-lister with bottomless pockets.
“I say this quite sincerely, this was never about me owning this hall,” he says. “My vision for this place was that we could just restore it to its former glory for the community to use.”
If the regular YouTube episodes DePree posts about the restoration make it sound like a Netflix documentary in the waiting, where ambitious Americans restore pride to a local community through a restoration of its prized assets – Welcome to Middleton, so to speak – they’re most certainly at the cliffhanger stage.
Not least because last week, Rochdale Council effectively thanked DePree for all his hard work so far but ruled that it wouldn’t be renewing the option to buy agreement with him, putting a stop on the whole project.
“As the owners of this historic building we have a responsibility to ensure its future is safeguarded and protected for the local community and wider public,” said a spokesperson for the council, which had previously renewed and extended the agreement several times.
“The council and other public bodies have invested, over several years, significant sums of public money alongside an immeasurable amount of advice and support to Mr DePree’s project but in the continuing absence of a viable plan for the future of the building, a new way forward must now be found. This will include working with our funding partners, the local community and volunteers to bring Hopwood Hall back to its former glory.”
It appears – and some locals tell me as much – Rochdale Council have got tired of waiting. For all DePree has presented plans to the local community, for all the admirable commitment to small restoration and skills projects and for all the Royal Horticultural Society awards they’ve received for the work to the gardens, local authorities seem to have wanted more concrete – so to speak – statements of intent, or more pertinently, funding.
DePree’s planning permission application was granted in 2022, the same year he penned Downton Shabby: One American’s Ultimate DIY Adventure Restoring His Family’s English Castle. It was a key strand of the option to buy agreement and may now become the subject of a legal dispute.
It’s possible to argue that the planning green light wasn’t a de facto approval of DePree’s overall plan for Hopwood Hall but merely an approval for a change of use to the ground floor; the application itself stated that “no physical changes to the building are proposed at this stage.”
But DePree believed the deal with the council was legally binding. His lawyer, Nick Wells from Ward Hadaway LLP, says local authorities should honour the agreement to sell the property, arguing the only condition for doing so was that planning permission was granted.
“The wording of the agreement is there in black and white and says that the option can be exercised on only one condition: ‘provided that Planning Permission has been granted’.”
Ultimately, however, even if DePree’s plans are well intentioned, the fact remains that as of now there is nowhere near the level of investment, either public or private, required to make this restoration story a reality.
Progress has been slow and a pandemic has got in the way. But is there a sense the hard work to date will now go to waste? The well-meaning volunteers involved certainly don’t lay the blame at DePree’s medieval door.
“I used to come here as a child,” says Pam Taylor, one of the volunteer gardeners. “My Mum actually worked here during World War II – and I promised her in her last years that I would do whatever I could do to help this place. We’ve done so much, and Hopwood [DePree] has given everything to get Hopwood Hall to where it is now. I have nothing but admiration for him, but it’s really unsettling that the future is uncertain again.”
DePree, for his part, thinks that having the keys to the property would unlock the private investment needed. Rochdale Council are about to embark on a feasibility study of their own to determine the best way to go forward. It may, or may not, involve DePree in his role as chair of the Hopwood Foundation.
“I just want this to work,” sighs DePree. “For the hall to be saved for the community that has poured their heart and souls into it. Never mind what I’ve done, the amount of money that I’ve spent coming here to do this and moving over from another country, but it’s really the community this is all about. It just, it breaks my heart to see people roll up their sleeves only to be told that we haven’t made progress.
He looks up from his cup of tea at the hall one last time. “I’m just hoping we’re able and allowed to continue.”