on Church Street. A fire at the store on 1 December 1865 destroyed much of Jeffery's uninsured stock, eventually leading to the business failing. Jeffery put the hall up for action in 1869 but failed to find a buyer until 1877 when Liverpool shipowner Frederick Richards Leyland purchased the house for £19,000, moving in with his family from nearby Speke Hall. Leyland, who was somewhat of an art enthusiast, decorated the house with paintings of varying styles including Edward Burne-Jones's Night and Day and Ford Madox Brown's The Entombment. Leyland later sold the building to the McGuffies, a family of shipowners who demolished the west wing and converted the remainder into a Hydropathic Hotel. After living there for some 30 years, the hotel closed in 1912. After a short spell as the headquarters of the Middlesex Regiment and as an army hospital in the 1950s, the building was converted into a fee-paying girls' school under the management of the Convent of Notre Dame. In 1970, the small school merged with Notre Dame High School located on Mount Pleasant to form Notre Dame Woolton (now St Julie's Catholic High School). As the school expanded, new modern buildings were built nearby leading to Woolton Hall being abandoned. Soon, the building fell into disrepair, eventually being marked for demolition in the 1980s. The building was saved after local resident John Hibbert purchased the Hall and spent £100,000 in refurbishments; soon after, on 28 June 1982, Woolton Hall become a Grade I listed building. In 2005, there were plans to convert the house into a retirement home and build 62 other new retirement flats on the grounds of the estate. In 2021, following years of stagnation, a major fire in 2019 and incidents of vandalism, the building was added to Historic England's "Heritage at Risk Register" as a category A site, the highest priority, meaning the building is at "immediate risk of further rapid deterioration or loss of fabric". Ownership Molyneux family 1704–1766 Ashton family 1772–1865 Judge James Reddecliffe Jeffery 1865–1877 Sir Frederick Leyland 1877–1898 Captain Peter McGuffie 1902–1948 Sisters of Notre Dame 1948–1970 Mr J.B Hibbert & family 1980 – c.1985 Jim Murray c.1985 - c.2005 Jim Murray and Abid Chudary c.2005 - Present Architecture Exterior From its outside, the slate roofed two-storey structure is built entirely of stone consisting of seven bay windows, two of which break forward under pediments. The windows,