The Sand House and its surroundings - An animation

Doncaster's former Sand House was created in a unique way. All its walls were carved from solid rock. Standing as it did within its owner's quarry, which later became a sunken garden, it was easy to forget the Sand House's origins. Photographs taken of the house in the early part of the twentieth century could not easily convey any sense of the layout of the locality.
By the start of the Second World War the Sand House had been destroyed and the former quarry filled back up almost to original ground level. Any appreciation of how the house had once stood in relation to the features around it became infinitely more difficult to achieve. Indeed, the fact that there was ever a habitable house on the site - let alone one of such large proportions - began to be lost. Its adjacent, surviving tunnel network gained much more attention during the rest of the twentieth century, even after the known tunnels had been filled in.
With the help of this video animation, produced by Joe Hare on behalf of The Sand House Charity, we hope that viewers will be able, once again, to appreciate the magnificent Sand House and gain a clear understanding of the how it looked from around the 1870s until the 1920s.