The Country Houses of Greater London

Lecture given on Thursday 26 November 2009 by Caroline Knight FSA

The subject of this paper and of my recent book is the suburban house round London, from the late 15^th to the 20thC. These were the second homes of the well-off, within easy reach of the capital. For men with government posts, court connections or business interests a London house was essential. He probably also owned a house in the country with a landed estate, but travel to and from a distant estate could be very time-consuming. For instance, Bess of Hardwick took 7 days to travel by coach from Derbyshire to the house she had rented in Chelsea in 1591; Sir John Clerk of Penicuik took 11 days to ride from Edinburgh to London in 1727. An additional house close to London was the answer, the equivalent of the ‘country cottage’ in the Cotswolds or the South Downs today. Some of these today are quite large, very comfortable and with valuable contents, and the same was true in the past. These ‘suburban houses’ as I call them were easily reached and provided an escape for a family from the disease and overcrowding of London. The head of the household could travel up and down to London fairly easily, while his wife and children enjoyed the summer months in the country, with an active social life and lots of friends and neighbours within easy reach. Life in a country house at the centre of a large estate would be more formal, with a big household, duties in the locality and few social equals nearby; social life would be more limited and more provincial than in the environs of London.

One of the purposes of these houses was to provide their owners with fresh air and outdoor life. London in the 17^th and 18^th centuries was densely built up, crowded and noisy; the concept of public parks and access to open space in an urban setting had not evolved. Where were these houses? Many were in Middlesex, a county that has now more or less disappeared. Its landscape was mainly flat, fertile and unspectacular, and some villages were more desirable than others. The river itself provided easy access, so the villages to the west of London became fashionable: Chelsea, Chiswick, Kew, Twickenham and Richmond. The villages to the south of the Thames were of course in Surrey and Kent. East of the River Lea was Essex, with the Thames-side villages less desirable as docks and ship-related industries polluted the area and poor housing was built for the workers. From the 17thC the royal family increasingly moved west, so courtiers found it more convenient to be close to the Thames and within easy reach of Whitehall and St. James’s, Kew, Hampton Court and Windsor. Houses with views were hard to come by: the high ground of Greenwich, Blackheath and Charlton allowed fine views of the Thames, while to the north the hills of Hampstead and Highgate had extensive views over London.

A house with a few acres in a fashionable village was very desirable, competition for them was fierce and they were not cheap. The usual landholding was about 5 to 15 acres, with additional land rented if required. Here is an example: Balms in Hackney. This compact brick house belonged to Sir George Whitmore, Alderman and later Lord Mayor. His father had rented the earlier house on the site, and once he bought the freehold he rebuilt it. These City families had plenty of cash, whereas landed families might be asset-rich but cash-poor, and were less likely to build their own houses, although they often bought houses built with City money.

In terms of its grounds, this is a fairly typical lay-out for a 17thC house. There is an axial approach through a substantial gatehouse into a walled forecourt. To one side are formal pleasure gardens close to the house, one enclosure with a sculpture, the next with a garden building (or possibly a green bower). There seems to be a clair-voyée allowing a view onto a canal with a boat, perhaps for fishing, and there are corner gazebos giving a view over the water. Possibly this L-shaped area of water is the remains of an earlier moat. (Many early houses round London had moats). Self-sufficiency was very important, so there are large areas of kitchen garden and orchards. The grassy enclosures have single trees which might have been walnuts or mulberries, with fruit trees beyond. Fresh produce from the suburban house would be supplied to the London house when the family was not in residence. (There are many references to this, in several houses; it clearly was common practice). In addition grazing was required for the horses; several were required for a large family with a coach and six, as here. Hay would be sent to the London house as needed. Milk would also be home-produced and cows are grazing in two large fields. The barns and stables were an essential part of a suburban house. Outbuildings would also include a dairy and a brewhouse, and laundry would sometimes be sent down from the London house, so a drying ground would be needed.

These suburban houses were often innovative in their plans, as Nicholas Cooper pointed out in his discussion of ‘The Suburban House and the Compact Plan’ in his Houses of the Gentry 1480-1660. Because they were for relaxation and were usually not exceptionally large, new ideas could be tried out in them; and ideas spread quickly, as these houses were much visited, being easy to reach compared to country houses. Late medieval and early Tudor houses were usually single ranges round one or more courtyards; examples are Brooke House, Hackney (demolished after bomb damage in WW2) or Fulham Palace, the suburban house of the Bishops London from 704, and still owned by the Church Commissioners today. This is a double courtyard house of irregular plan, replacing an earlier timber-framed house. Recent dendrochronology has dated the oak door into the courtyard to c. 1480. The double-height great hall has walls with diaper brickwork c. 1500, and the original timber roof is still there, above 18thC coved ceiling.

As early as the 1530s there are experiments with compact plans, and it does seem that the houses round London were leading the way with innovative ideas. Sutton House in Hackney (National Trust) is a very early example of a rather irregular H-plan, built by Sir Ralph Sadleir c. 1535. The reconstruction drawing by English Heritage shows the crow-stepped gables, replaced in the 18thC by a brick parapet. Instead of the usual double-height hall, it is a more modest single-storey space, which allows the great chamber to go directly above it, a type of planning which is used in a more sophisticated form in other houses, such as Charlton House. The family rooms open off the low end of the hall, the guest rooms from the high end.

Eastbury Manor in Barking is a well-preserved manor house on high ground, which was built by Clement Sysley, a City merchant in the 1560s. It became a farm and tenements over the 18^th and 19^th centuries, and its preservation became a cause-célèbre. After a campaign by the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings it was saved by the National Trust, who bought it in 1918. As usual at this date, no architect is known, however it is a well-planned and symmetrical H-plan, with two small staircases. The parlours have easy access to the walled garden (which still exists) and the entrance to the service rooms is discreetly hidden by the walled courtyard.

Even the H-plan began to seem a little extended, and more compact designs become usual. Double and triple-pile plans which were being experimented with from the 16thC became the norm by the mid-late 17thC and continued thereafter. They were more practical than the H-plan, suited to small sites, cheaper to build and easier to keep warm.

Danvers House, built 1622-3 by Sir John Danvers, is a fascinating example. It is a triple-pile house with a through hall and an impressive double staircase to the first floor with its apartments in each corner; lesser stairs, leading from basement to attics, are in side projections. It was demolished by 1700 and the site redeveloped as Danvers Street, so John Thorpe’s plan and small elevation (in the Soane Museum) are valuable records of a short-lived but much-admired house.

At its simplest, the compact plan could be just four rooms to a floor, a common type in town houses and one which adapted well to a larger scale in the country. Rainham Hall in Essex is a good example. The deep chimneybreasts allow for small closets and private access between the rooms. This house was built by a merchant, John Harle, in 1724 close to his wharves on the River Inglebourne. The area, close to the Thames marshes east of Dagenham, had become largely industrial by the early 20thC. The house was rescued by Colonel Mulliner after WW1 and carefully restored, and went to the National Trust in 1949. It is a fine example of a slightly old-fashioned Early Georgian house, in an area which has very few historic buildings.

Asgill House in Richmond is a neo-classical example of the compact plan, designed by Sir Robert Taylor in 1761 for Sir Charles Asgill, a City banker. It was illustrated in Vitruvius Britannicus in 1767. With its varied room shapes and good circulation it is an example of Taylor’s impressive design skills, providing a comfortable and fashionable house on a small scale. This was appealing even to a 20thC family, and it was beautifully restored by the present owner c. 1970.

By the late 19thC a looser type of plan had become usual. Norman Shaw’s Grim’s Dyke in Harrow Weald for the artist Frederick Goodall is a masterly example of apparently random planning, illustrated in The Builder in 1872. His studio was at one end, the entrance is off-centre, and the materials echo the vernacular styles of South-East England.

A stark difference between these suburban houses and country seats was their rapid turnover. Following the Reformation a large number of ecclesiastical properties was released onto the market and a number of speculators bought and sold houses, sometimes only keeping them for a matter of months. For example Brooke House in Hackney, built by the Dean of St. Paul’s in the late 15thC, changed hands almost annually in the mid-16thC. From 1532-5 it belonged to the 6^th Earl of Northumberland; that year it was acquired by Henry VIII, who immediately granted it to Thomas Cromwell; it reverted to the Crown the following year. In 1547 Edward VI granted it to Sir Ralph Sadleir (who had built Sutton House in Hackney); in 1548 he sold it to the Carew family whose country estate was Antony in Cornwall, and it belonged to them for a generation.

Post-Reformation some houses continued to change hands surprisingly often. There was little sense that the suburban house was part of a family inheritance that must be preserved, and the fact that widows were frequently left these houses meant that a prosperous son with a young family would set himself up in his own house during his mother’s lifetime. Others would be sold as a result of fluctuating fortunes: these houses were luxuries, not necessities. As a result, there can be a bewildering number of owners.

Chiswick House belonged to a succession of the great and the good in the 17thC. Early in 17thC it was owned by Sir Edward Wardour, by 1624 it belonged to Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset; in 1638 it was owned by Philip, Earl of Pembroke and the following year had passed to Lord Paulett. His widow remarried and bought out her sons in 1651; in 1664 it was sold to Charles II for the use of his spoilt illegitimate son James, Duke of Monmouth, who was only 15 at the time. By 1677 it belonged to Richard Jones, Earl of Ranelagh, who got into trouble for unscrupulous management of Irish revenues and had to sell it in 1682 to Edward Seymour, Speaker of the House of Commons. He resold it soon afterwards to Ranelagh’s relative, Richard Boyle, 1^st Earl of Burlington for £4,800, making him the ninth owner of this important house in less than 60 years. It remained in the Boyle family before being inherited by the Devonshires and being sold by them to Middlesex County Council in 1929. This long spell in the ownership of a wealthy family probably preserved it at a time when many other houses were being sold and demolished.

Changes in ownership mean greater difficulties in research. I have found it much more complicated than researching a country house in the continuous ownership of one family. In that case the family archives might be in the house or in the local record office, may well be catalogued and are probably easily available. In contrast, the papers relating to a suburban house can mean trawling through the records of many families. Because few of these houses are still in private hands, it is highly unlikely that the relevant papers will be in the house. A private house such as Syon, still belonging to the Duke of Northumberland, used to have an archive in the house, but the papers have recently been moved to Alnwick in Northumberland, making access much harder.

Sometimes records are scattered through the papers of different families who are not the owners. Marble Hill, Twickenham, was built c. 1724 by Henrietta Howard, Countess of Suffolk. Henry Herbert, 9^th Earl of Pembroke of Wilton House, was one of her trustees and architectural advisers so an early plan and elevation for the house, drawn by Colen Campbell, is in the Pembroke Papers in the Wiltshire Record Office – that meant a trip to Trowbridge. Her brother was the owner of Blickling Hall in Norfolk, and her plan for a Rococo flower garden and her contract with her gardener have ended up with his archives, in the Hobart Papers in the Norfolk Record Office - so a trip in the opposite direction to Norwich. Many of us in this room will have burrowed through archives in scattered places in the hopes of nuggets for our research. These NRO papers include instructions to her gardener to send produce regularly to her London house in Savile Row. Other material on this house is widely scattered, although there is much secondary material in Horace Walpole’s Correspondence and in Croker’s two volumes of Lady Suffolk’s letters published in 1824.

Letters and diaries are particularly useful sources for me, as I am interested not just in the architecture of these houses but in the way they were used. Entertaining was an important aspect of suburban life, and these houses were often lavishly decorated and furnished. Being close to London and belonging to families who were very aware of the latest fashions, the interiors and contents could be of exceptional quality. Ham House in Petersham is a remarkably well-preserved example. The Queen’s Antechamber and the Queen’s Closet were the first and last rooms of the state apartment, planned in 1672 by the Duke and Duchess of Lauderdale for entertaining (they hoped) Queen Catherine of Braganza. The furnishings of this house were of the greatest luxury, with imports from the Far East, the Netherlands and France, and of course London-made goods as well.

Marble Hill also had fine interiors. The Great Room is the main reception room on the first floor, and the most richly decorated room in the house. Lady Suffolk commissioned a set of five fashionable ruin pictures from the Roman artist Panini, to be inset as overmantel and overdoors, signed and dated 1738. These were sold off in the early 20thC, and have been gradually bought back by English Heritage and reinstated, to good effect.

Chiswick House was also lavishly furnished, for instance with this pair of very showy side tables recently bought back at the Bute sale at Christie’s by English Heritage for Chiswick House. They were probably designed by William Kent and are among his most Roman Baroque furniture designs. Possibly they were carved by Guelfi, the Italian sculptor brought over to London by the 3^rd Lord Burlington.

The Victoria & Albert Museum has an interesting suite of furniture from David Garrick’s house at Hampton. This pair of small bookcases and a cupboard, made of painted pine with green and white chinoiserie designs, was made by Thomas Chippendale for David Garrick’s dressing room in his riverside house at Hampton. The leading actor and theatre manager of his time, he was keenly aware of fashion and went to the top furniture maker in London for furnishings for his Adelphi house and his suburban house near Hampton Court. These are very different: he and Chippendale recognised the decorum of furniture for a town house and one in the country. These pieces, painted in fresh colours, have a very sophisticated simplicity while for his Adam-designed London house he ordered silk-covered suites of chairs for his drawing room.

Inventories are invaluable. For instance, at Garrick’s death in 1779 an inventory was made of both his London house and that at Hampton; that is how we know which room had the Chippendale furniture. (It is now in the Victoria & Albert Museum). The Hampton inventory lists every object in the house down to utilitarian pieces in the kitchen and outbuildings, and even itemises the contents of the garden buildings, such as his Shakespeare Temple. Zoffany’s 1762 painting shows David Garrick and his wife, the dancer Eva Maria Veigel, lounging elegantly in their riverside garden in front of the 1758 temple, which contained a statue of Shakespeare. Garrick did much to revive interest in Shakespeare’s plays, so this is entirely appropriate. On the basis of the inventory a copy of Roubiliac’s 1758 statue of Shakespeare has been reinstated here by the Temple Trust, which restored it in 1998.

The study of inventories over the last quarter century has done much to increase our understanding of houses and how they were used. Pioneering work was done by Peter Thornton of the Victoria & Albert Museum in the 1970s, using the inventories of two important suburban houses, Ham House and Osterley Park, both of which were then being run by the museum on behalf of the National Trust. Unusually, both houses had much of their original furniture which has been put back in the rooms for which it was made, giving a strong sense of the formality of state rooms in, respectively, the late 17th and late 18^th centuries. Osterley’s Eating Room, part of the original Tudor house was one of several rooms remodelled in the 1760s by Robert Adam for the Child family, City bankers. Adam designed the ceiling, colour scheme, key pieces of furniture and commissioned the ruin pictures.

Ham and Osterley are exceptionally well documented, partly because they remained with one family over several centuries. Most houses are much harder to research. Maps, parish records, rate books, the hearth tax, wills, diaries, letters and journals all provide information. Lady Mary Coke’s Journals, describing her life at Aubrey House in Kensington, which she rented from 1767-86, are illuminating. She was a keen gardener and discusses the work she is doing herself in her garden, her poultry, the problems she is having with gardeners, and the risks of highwaymen on the nearby main road (now Holland Park Avenue). She also makes clear that she can easily visit friends in central London for dinner (then of course an afternoon meal) or visit her mother, the widowed Duchess of Argyll, at Sudbrook Park in Petersham where she goes every Sunday. Aubrey House was built c. 1721 and is somewhat old-fashioned by her time; she redecorates her drawing room in 1774, employing the fashionable architect James Wyatt. A later inhabitant did some charming watercolours of interiors, one of which shows this room. They are in Kensington & Chelsea Archives, and are typical of the good amateur watercolours produced in the 19thC.

Other houses and gardens were recorded by artists, with varying degrees of detail. Gandy’s theatrical watercolour of an interior of Pitshanger Manor in 1804 shows the collection of antique vases and fragments, the folio volumes and other books, well-used by the architect-owner Sir John Soane. The Royal Collection has a large collection of watercolours, many commissioned by Queen Victoria. Claremont was built for Clive of India, and designed in 1768 by Capability Brown and Henry Holland. It was bought by the government for Prince Leopold and Princess Charlotte, and was loaned to Queen Victoria by her uncle in her early married life. She commissioned several views, including a Joseph Nash watercolour of the saloon, signed and dated 1848.This shows the main 18thC reception room in use as a dining room in 19thC manner.

These views were all private commissions, but topographical artists were also being asked to produce prints for commercial use. By the 18thC, tourism was well established and books illustrated the major sites. Many of the houses round London were visible from the Thames or from the road, so foreign or English visitors to London did not need to travel far to see some of these suburban houses; in some villages, such as Twickenham, they were closely clustered together. They were therefore much more likely to be seen than remote country houses, and many could be visited. Sophie von la Roche, an observant German visitor, describes her visit to Osterley in 1786. This was arranged through a German friend who gave her five tickets. She and her friends were shown round by the friendly housekeeper who gave them cherry brandy and cakes before they departed, and who would have expected a handsome tip to augment her income.

Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain published 1724-6, has long descriptions of some of these suburban houses, especially Canons in Edgware, the splendid house recently built by James Brydges, 1^st Duke of Chandos. Defoe describes it as ‘a most magnificent palace or mansion house … so lofty, so majestic, that a pen can ill describe it … the inside is as glorious, as the outside is fine ...’ and ends, unconvincingly, ‘But I am not writing paneygyrick.’ [sic]

Watts’ Seats of the Nobility & Gentry was a well-timed and successful publication which came out in 1779. It provided a single illustration and a short text on each house; these included many suburban houses round London, as well as some of the great country houses further afield. It showed the houses of famous men, illustrating Garrick’s house the year he died, glossing over the fact that a road separated his house from its riverside garden. Watts also included Pope’s house, which was a literary shrine long after his death. So many visitors made a pilgrimage to see his house that the early 19thC owner, Lady Howe, demolished it and built herself another on the site, seeming not to care that she was nicknamed ‘Queen of the Goths’ for this act of vandalism.

Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill was so much visited that he wrote a Description of the house as a guide book for visitors. It was so much talked about and so easy to reach that he had to introduce rules: they had to buy tickets in advance, were limited to groups of four people at a time, and children were banned. Walpole himself retreated to a picturesque cottage across the road so he could get on with his reading and writing.

By the 19thC roads were much improved, and families could reach their country estates within reasonable distance of London within a couple of days. With the coming of the railway the speed of travel accelerated, and the concept of weekend visits became possible. With the beginnings of public transport people could travel in to work from outside the city, so London continued to spread. Villages such as Clapham, Hackney and Fulham became built up with cheap terrace housing. Queen Victoria, on a visit to Claremont in 1870 described the journey as ‘rather a disagreeable drive through the suburbs of London.’ These changes meant that a house close to London became less and less attractive, and harder to sell.

Lady Mary Coke of Aubrey House moved to Morton Hall in Chiswick in 1807 and died there in 1811, after which the house was put on the market. Sale documents are an extremely useful resource by the 19thC, often with plans of the grounds, sometimes of the house too, and details of the landholding and outbuildings. The 6^th Duke of Devonshire of Chiswick House (the house next door) was interested in buying it to extend his gardens, and asked Samuel Ware to report on it. Ware said that ‘at the present time, country houses generally in the neighbourhood of London are reduced in value, and do not find a ready sale.’ He valued it at £9,350 although the Duke acquired it for considerably less, and promptly demolished the house. The 6^th Duke was the last of the Devonshires to use Chiswick House as his suburban house, and after his death in 1856 it was let to various tenants.

Other houses were given up by their families, who kept their country seats and used them increasingly. The National Trust and the evocative illustrations in Country Life encouraged interest in the country house as opposed to the suburban one, which by the 20thC was often in depressing surroundings. Architectural historians of the 20thC have preferred to concentrate on the country house, so I hope my book will redress the balance somewhat. I want to end with a brief look at the last example of a suburban house used in the traditional manner, with an immensely rich owner who maintained three houses – in London, Kent and close to London – until his death in 1939.

Sir Philip Sassoon was the rich and cultivated heir to the Sassoon fortune, to which was added his mother’s Rothschild fortune. He inherited his parent’s vast London house in Park Lane with its collection of fine French 18^th furniture. He also took on his father’s seat as MP for Hythe and commissioned Sir Herbert Baker to design him a curious Cape Dutch style house at Port Lympne, which was given smart interiors by various different designers. His father had rented a substantial house north of London, Trent Park in Middlesex, on land which had formerly been part of Enfield Chace. (The original house had been built by Sir Philip Jebb, a successful physician). Philip Sassoon was able to buy the freehold in 1923 and then rebuilt the house, using Philip Tilden as his architect and turning it from a rambling Victorian pile into a recreation of an Early Georgian house. Devonshire House in Piccadilly was being demolished c. 1921, so he bought much of the stonework and incorporated the entrance and window surrounds it into his remodelled house. It was designed to house his collection of 18thC English pictures and decorative arts and to provide an impressive background for his lavish weekend house parties, where he entertained people such as Churchill and the Prince of Wales. Many estates and collections were being broken up and sold off in the 1920s and 30s, and Sassoon bought several garden sculptures for his grounds from the Stowe sale, such as a lead group of Samson and the Philistine after Giambologna. Produce from the large kitchen gardens was sent to his other houses in the traditional manner. Modern touches were provided by the swimming pool beside the house and the airfield in the park where he kept his private plane. But this lavish lifestyle ended with his early death in 1939. The house was requisitioned for interrogating high-ranking prisoners of war, and is now the administrative headquarters of Middlesex University. After Sassoon, no-one emulated the London – suburban – country lifestyle, and these houses have had to find other uses.

Some of these houses today belong to national heritage organizations such as the National Trust and English Heritage, are open to the public and are well-known. I was pleased to find during my researches that so many lesser known houses are still in use, few of course in their original guise as family houses. Instead they are today schools, colleges, hospitals, offices, golf clubs, hotels, nunneries, local authority museums and flats. I hope that my book will do something to restore these houses to their rightful place in the social and architectural history of London, and to counter the emphasis on the country house which has prevailed for so long.