US film maker in legal dispute with council over control of grade II* listed hall

Hopwood Hall in Middleton, Greater Manchester, is a grade II* listed manorial hall owned by the council.

According to a report on the BBC, Hopwood DePree said his grandfather told him stories of "Hopwood Castle" as a child in Michigan, but he only discovered the real hall existed while researching his family history in 2013.

It was derelict by the time he first visited, and he was told in 2015 that it would be “beyond repair” in another five to 10 years.

In 2017, the council entered into an options agreement with DePree which gave him the option to buy the building for a “nominal fee” if he could produce a commercially viable business model to secure the long term future of the hall, alongside a detailed planning permission.

According to the BBC, DePree began work on the building and got planning permission in 2022 to refurbish it as an event and hospitality venue.

However, in November last year, the council decided not to renew the options agreement.

In a statement, it said: “Although this agreement has been renewed a number of times since 2017, a viable business case and funding strategy has not been forthcoming, and so the council’s cabinet has made the decision to not renew the options agreement.

“The council sees Hopwood Hall as a very important part of Middleton’s heritage and wants it to play a key role in the area’s future.

“[…] As a council, we have a duty to protect public money and important, council-owned assets like Hopwood Hall, and ensure they have a viable future which will benefit the wider community. For that reason, we have commissioned independent financial consultants to assess the business model proposed by Hopwood Productions and they concluded that these proposals would be loss making and unlikely to be able to secure future public or private funding.”

According to the BBC, DePree has spent £750,000 of his own money on the project, and has now launched legal action in an attempt to be declared the home’s legal owner, arguing that he has complied with his end of the agreement.

Nick Wells, a partner at Ward Hadaway who represents Hopwood DePree, said: “We have reviewed many years of documents and emails and eventually obtained some previously unseen evidence through FOI and SAR requests, many of which Rochdale Borough Council tried to block. The evidence points to the council having changed its position since entering into the Option Agreement in 2017 and leads to a strong suspicion that the report and recommendations on which Cabinet made its decision to withdraw in October 2024 was based on inaccurate information on the contents of the Option Agreement from 2017.

“We are therefore asking the High Court to intervene and hold Rochdale Council to the decisions that they made in 2017 rather than the decisions they have purported to have made in 2024."

The council declined to comment on ongoing legal discussions.

Lottie Winson