BY CHARLES EVANS Syon House, and its 200-acre park, Syon Park, is in west London, historically within the parish of Isleworth, in the county of Middlesex. It belongs to the Duke of Northumberland and is now his family’s London residence. After the dissolution of the convent on the site, Syon was occupied by Protector Somerset and John Dudley, Duke of Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland, … Continue reading Syon
BY CHARLES EVANS Buscot Park is a country house at Buscot near the town of Faringdon in Oxfordshire. Built in the late eighteenth century from his own designs by E.L Townsend, Buscot was, and is now again, a charming building of the Age of Elegance. But nineteenth century additions, including a top-heavy roof, concealed its character. This was removed and the house reduced in size … Continue reading Buscot Park
BY CHARLES EVANS Among several English houses with the name Charlton House, the most prominent is a Jacobean building in Charlton, London. It is regarded as the best-preserved ambitious Jacobean house in Greater London. It was built in 1607–12 of red brick with stone dressing, and has an “E”-plan layout. The interior features a great hall, chapel, state dining room, saloon and gallery. The house … Continue reading Charlton House
BY CHARLES EVANS Sir William Sharington, a man of the Tudor renaissance, preserved the entire cloister (13th and 15th centuries) of the nunnery at Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire which, c. 1550, he converted into a highly picturesque dwelling. Sharington, servant of Protector Somerset, was a pioneer, with Sir John Thynne of Longleat in the new Italian architecture, and his work here comprises some of its … Continue reading Lacock Abbey
BY CHARLES EVANS Barrington Court in Langport, Somerset, was built between 1514-20 for Lord Daubeny, a military commander who had served Henry VIII in his French war and been present at the famous pageant of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. The material is the local Ham Hill stone, of a rich golden colour, of which the quarries also produced a notable school of … Continue reading Barrington Court
BY CHARLES EVANS In 1871 William Morris fell in love with, and acquired, the grey gabled manor house lying among the Thames-side water meadows and enclosed in a romantic old garden. It was probably built around 1570, in the style traditional of the Cotswolds, on the fringe of which it stands, in Lechlade in Oxfordshire. But Morris’s coming is the more significant date; for it … Continue reading Kelmscott Manor
BY CHARLES EVANS Henry William Paget, Earl of Uxbridge, who commanded the Allied Cavalry and lost a leg at Waterloo, was, in recognition, created Marquess of Anglesea and remembered by his family as Uncle One-Leg. About 1810 he had engaged James Wyatt to remodel Plas Newydd, which stands on the Southern shore of the island near the end of the Victoria Bridge and looking across … Continue reading Plas Newydd, Anglesea
BY CHARLES EVANS A London architect must have conceived this very remarkable house built by Sir Henry Griffith in 1600-10, for it has little in common with other Yorkshire houses, but is one of the most mature of late Elizabethan designs. Burton Agnes Hall is located in Driffield, Yorkshire. Approached through a gatehouse with four domed turrets, the front is a symmetrical composition contained by … Continue reading Burton Agnes Hall
BY CHARLES EVANS ‘A haunt of ancient peace’. But the much-quoted line was written here by Tennyson, whose home, Somersby, is near-by, and may well have been inspired by Gunby, situated in Skegness, Lincolnshire. Sir William Massingberd, of a Saxon family settled hereabouts since the 14th Century, built the hall in 1700. The walled gardens, stable-yard, pigeon house, and other surroundings are as little altered … Continue reading Gunby Hall
BY CHARLES EVANS The builder of Loseley, where a house existed from much earlier times, was Sir William More, a kinsman of the Blessed Sir Thomas More, and son of Sir Christopher More, a trusted servant of Henry VIII. Building accounts show the work to have occupied the years 1561-69, so that the house is one of the earliest built under Queen Elizabeth – who … Continue reading Loseley Park
BY CHARLES EVANS Built by Noel Hill, First Lord Berwick, in 1784, from designs by a little-known Scottish architect, George Stewart, with an important picture gallery inserted by Nash in 1807. The park and lake are excellent typical productions of the landscape-architect Humphrey Repton. Attingham Park lies near the village of Atcham, Shropshire. Stewart’s building, with its tall, slender columns and colonnades, well illustrates the … Continue reading Attingham Park
BY CHARLES EVANS Stag-hunting from which fox-hunting developed, brought Charles, 2nd Duke of Richmond and Lennox, to Chichester and the South Downs around 1720. His father was one of Charles II’s natural sons by Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth. For him Sir William Chambers built a hunting box and the much more magnificent stable quadrangle. About 1800 James Wyatt began adding to the former … Continue reading Goodwood House
BY CHARLES EVANS Lord Darnley, afterwards husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, was born at Temple Newsam east of Leeds, Yorkshire – so-called for having originally been a preceptory of the Knights Templar. The oldest part of the present house dates from c.1550, but the house was virtually rebuilt in 1630 by Sir Arthur Ingram. The dignity of the design, simplified from the ornate exuberance of … Continue reading Temple Newsam
BY CHARLES EVANS Industry throve under the Tudors’ new order, but at the expense of the journeymen artisans and the cottage industries. Thomas Paycocke was one of the new capitalist factory owners, and in the Essex village of Coggeshall, facing the street, in around 1500 he built himself this beautiful house of oak and brick. Almost every beam inside and out is enriched with carving. … Continue reading Paycockes
BY CHARLES EVANS Family feuds long kept alive the custom of local warfare in the West Country. So when Sir Richard Edgecumbe returned with Henry Tudor (1485) to his manor beside the Tamar from which a neighbour had driven him, he rebuilt the house strongly in granite, set around a courtyard and with a formidable gate. Cothele in Cornwall seems as if left unaltered since … Continue reading Cothele
BY CHARLES EVANS This peculiar, circular house, erected by two artistic spinsters and filled out with their curious handicrafts, was built about 1800. The Misses Jane and Mary Parminter, of good Devon middle class stock, travelled abroad for a decade sight-seeing, then decided to continue their association at Exmouth in a house which they designed to incorporate certain features of the Byzantine Church of San … Continue reading A La Ronde
BY CHARLES EVANS Hughenden Manor is best known as the home of former British Prime Minister and author, Benjamin Disraeli. Hughenden stands high among the Chiltern Hills, overlooking a charming park, which also contains the church where Disraeli is buried. The house, with 1780 origins, is really Georgian, of red brick with blue headers,but was ingeniously altered in 1847 by the architect E.B. Lamb to … Continue reading Hughenden
BY CHARLES EVANS Probably the most picturesque of the black-and-white houses of Cheshire and Lancashire, Little Moreton Hall owes its curious appearance to three generations of the Moreton Family. Also known as Old Moreton Hall, Little Moreton is a moated half-timbered manor house four miles southwest of Congleton in Cheshire. It consists of a long and lofty gatehouse range built in the early sixteenth century, … Continue reading Little Moreton Hall
BY CHARLES EVANS In its beautiful setting of lawns and gardens, the rose-red brick mansion of Blickling Hall, many-gabled and turreted, satisfies the most romantic conception of the English Country House. It was built in 1616-28 in Aylsham in Norfolk, on the moated site of a house previously belonging to the Boleyn Family, from the designs by Robert Lyminge, architect of Hatfield House with which … Continue reading Blickling
