THESE DAYS if you saw a group of youths carrying bats on a street in Wandsworth, South London, you might be afraid. But between 1938 and 1989 it was more likely that the lads were on their way to Alf Gover’s cricket school. Several generations of young cricketers used to knock on the unmarked street door of the school on East Hill, and shuffle through the sweat-soaked changing room into the gas-lit coaching hall where Gover held court.

Tall, trim, invariably wearing an England jumper and a neckerchief, Gover had a successful career as a fast bowler for Surrey, although war restricted his appearances for England to four matches. He once took four wickets in four balls. However, he will be best remembered as a coach. Long before “centres of excellence”, with video analysis and bowling machines, Gover’s shed was the place to learn the game. Whether you were at public school or from a council estate, you were welcome. Players such as Sir Vivian Richards, Sir Garfield Sobers and Brian Lara came from the West Indies to learn there.

In 1953 the Pakistan team practised there for a year before their first tour of England. The trip was worthwhile: in 1954 Pakistan won the fourth Test at the Oval, with Fazal Mahmood, who died in May, showing the effects of Gover’s coaching by taking 12 wickets. While they were visiting, the Pakistan team lodged in Gover’s house, a seven-bedroom Georgian building next to the school. The house was used to being home to garrulous youngsters. In the 18th century it was a school for “seventeen young ladies of good reputation”. The 17 pegs on which they once hung their coats and hats still exist.

Gover left in 1989, 12 years before he died at the age of 93. But when Robert Lance Hughes, a former army officer turned architecture student, bought the place in 2001 it was derelict. “Alf had let the house crumble around him,” Lance Hughes said. Burglars had broken in and stolen the fittings, including several fine fireplaces.

Lance Hughes has spent £600,000 restoring the house to its Georgian splendour under the supervision of English Heritage. Sadly the cricket school that Gover built had to come down, as did his shop, for structural reasons.

Officially the house, listed Grade II*, is from 1736, but Lance Hughes’s architect, Peter Powlesland, believes that an older house is hidden. He found that one of the internal walls was formerly external, and had been built about 1670, suggesting that initially the house was just one room thick and then was extended some 60 years later.

In 1785 a large semi-circular bay, running up all three storeys, was added at the back, making the house, as Powlesland says, “thoroughly up-to-the-minute”. Delicate coving was then added and the old wood panelling covered with hessian and papered over “to give a fashionable flat wall”. This was replaced by Gover in the 1950s with “a bubbly wallpaper, absolutely horrid”. Lance Hughes has stripped away the bubbles and the hessian, too, to reveal the wood panelling; this has now been repainted in its original colour, which was discovered after scraping back the surfaces.

The windows, which in the Victorian age had lost their beading as was the fashion, have been restored to their original look, with Welsh oak inserted in the panes of opaque “crown glass”. To get such a “perfect imperfect” look, Lance Hughes brought a squad of tradesmen up from the country. “If you get a London tradesman, you get too clean a job,” he said. “So I brought a crew from Hereford to go wild in London for a year and a half and to add the wobble back into the house.”

And wobble it most splendidly does. There are few straight lines and square corners. From the back some of the windows seem wildly awry, but this adds to the charm. Gover’s son, who lived on the top floor of the house, used to enter his room from an iron ladder in the garden. Now that is removed and the space is a pleasant and peaceful courtyard.

There used to be petrol pumps in front of the house, but Lance Hughes wanted to turn the space back into a garden to “give the house some ground to sit in”. He designed a “sort of Versailles-style staircase”, with steps running up either side of a lion’s face fountain. The wrought-iron gate dates from the 17th century and was found in a scrapyard. “It was awfully bent, so we had to straighten it with a bulldozer.”

This house oozes charm, from the sturdy front door with horizontal iron strips battered into it as protection — “you can imagine the villains they used to get around here” — to the dressing room with a cupboard under the window in which filled chamber pots would be stowed — “moths hate the smell of urine” — to the very warm room at the top where Gover used to grow tomatoes.

And then there is “Alf’s throne room”, the bathroom that Gover used, which has a large fireplace and a secret cupboard above it “where Alf used to store his pyjamas to get warm”. Once it was decorated in the bright turquoise that many bathrooms endured in the 1970s but Lance Hughes has stripped out the bathroom furniture, painted the room a deep grey-green, and suggests that it now has “ something of a library feel”.

While he has been seeking a buyer, the house has earned its keep as a location for photoshoots. Laura Ashley, John Lewis and the White Company shoot here, and the house represented Kenneth Tynan’s Georgian home in Islington in a recent BBC drama. The house has planning consent to be used as an art gallery. But it would seem a waste after such a meticulous restoration if the house was not once again lived in by a large family.

Wandsworth House is for sale for £2.295 million through Douglas & Gordon (020-7924 2000)

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