Hatton Grange, Shropshire

In the advancement of the human condition over time this country has long punched above its weight. A litany of progressive contributions in science, the arts, in civic affairs can be advanced but Handed on ventures that few of Britain’s bright ideas have proved quite so universally persuasive as the Industrial Revolution and Association Football. And in a corner of Shropshire lies an under-heralded country house with singular associations to both.

see: Alan Hannam

‘Ironbridge: The community draws its name from the famous Iron Bridge erected in 1779 by Abraham Darby III.‘ Designated a World Heritage Site, that UNESCO citation sadly omits to mention the name of the person who designed this ground-breaking and now internationally emblematic structure. Thomas Farnolls Pritchard was that man and Hatton Grange…

see: dickiemint

…a handsome brick mansion twenty miles east of Pritchard’s home town of Shrewsbury, stands as ‘the only extant house definitely built by Pritchard on a country estate.‘¹ Convincing circumstantial evidence has led to other Pritchard attributions, most noteably the much-restored Brockhampton House in Herefordshire – which, coincidentally, is for sale right now – but ‘the decoration of the interiors at Hatton is virtually unaltered [and] it remains Pritchard’s most complete existing work.‘¹

Hatton Grange was built in 1764 for Plowden Slaney on an estate acquired by the family (now Kenyon-Slaney) in the C16 and which today extends to some 2,000 acres. Originally iron masters themselves, the Slaneys had had business involvement with the pioneering Darbys of Coalbrookdale. But while Pritchard ‘has a place of national importance in the history of bridge-building‘ his domestic work, at least in the eyes of one authority, is merely ‘good mid-Georgian provincial‘.²

see source

Externally, Hatton’s most conspicuous alteration has been the addition in 1897 of those bays to the south front, an attempt to counter a percieved proportional imbalance in Pritchard’s original conception.

see source

But, as noted, the interior remains much as it was, including lashings of top-drawer carving and plasterwork (by Pritchard’s trusty band of local artisans) rightly celebrated by Country Life in a 1968 visit. The magazine attributed the survival of these features in part to the fact that the family ‘had other houses on which to spend their money‘.³

Shropshire Life

The author may or may not have been aware that in that same year they would add another, Simon Kenyon-Slaney (uncle of Hatton’s present owner, Rupert K-S) buying the ancient Shropshire estate of Chyknell (sold again last August for upwards of £5m, see left). And Simon’s son Andrew has since taken on the Pradoe estate, the Kenyon seat in the N-W of the county and which was for

see: Google Maps

70 years the home of Col. John Kenyon until his death in 2006. Pradoe (right), ‘a charming late C18 brick house situated in an extensive and attractive park,’† would have its own obscurity interrupted briefly when it starred as the location for BBC TV childrens wartime reality series Evacuation Manor House.

The 1845 marriage of William Kenyon and heiress Frances Slaney had united the two families, the latter inheriting Hatton on the death of her father, and Hatton’s most prominent incumbent, Robert Aglionby Slaney (who had fallen through the floor at the opening of the 1862 International Exhibition). Though pegged ‘a political hypochondriac‘ by The Times, over the course of a long parliamentary career Slaney emerged as a leading campaigner for the poor, ‘his philanthropic exertions universally commended‘. But, while hardly philanthropic, it is surely the exertions of his grandson on Saturday 8 March 1873 which give Hatton Grange its most fantastic claim to fame.

see source

At 3PM that day William Kenyon-Slaney, 25, also later to become a diligent MP and ‘model landlord’ of the Hatton estate, took the field at the Oval, south London, representing England against Scotland in what would be only the nascent sport of football’s second international fixture. The two teams had played out a 0-0 draw the previous November but this time England had a ‘lively, dashing attacker, among the best of the 1870s‘ in Kenyon-Slaney.†† ‘Undoubtedly the superior player,‘ notes a memoir, ‘Kenyon-Slaney’s dribbling qualities and the great pace he showed with the ball…caused the first score to be made by England.’ A ‘score’ which was not only the first-ever goal for England but the first in the history of international football. Back of the net, Hatton Grange, back of the net!

[G.II* listing]

¹ Ionides, J. Thomas Farnolls Pritchard of Shrewsbury, 1999.
² Colvin, H. A biographical dictionary of British architects 1660-1840, 1995.
³ Cornforth, J. Country Life 29 Feb 1968.
† Reid, P. Burke’s & Savills guide to country houses Vol.II, 1980.
†† Lamming, D. An English internationalists’ who’s who, 1990.

Dallam Tower, Cumbria

‘Among the many beautiful specimens of rural situation, there are few which can compare with Dallam Tower. Sheltered by tall and ancient trees, surrounded by an ancient park..it is justifiably esteemed as one of the prominent places in the country.’ (Lonsdale Magazine Aug 1821).

Some things change and some things stay the same:

see: Val Corbett Photography

To the southern foothills of the Lake District for a Grade 1 listed house lying so close to a tidal estuary at the top of Morecambe Bay that you don’t actually need a tower to see the sea. Which is just as well really because there isn’t one. Indeed, for a place so-named, there’s a distinct lack of verticality about Dallam Tower. The emphasis here is in fact precisely the opposite and best appreciated in widescreen:

see: Google Streetview

Dallam has been the seat of the Wilsons and their descendants (often via marriage or cousins hence Wilson→Bromley→Tryon→Villiers-Smith) since the latter part of the C17 when Edward Wilson acquired the estate some nine miles south of Lakeland’s ‘capital’, Kendal. And the man whose buildings still dominate and characterise that town as we see it today, George Webster, is also responsible for Dallam’s defining elongated facade.

see: Lune Rambler@Flickr

Webster was a local architect for local people and the finest flowering of an established family of masons-cum-architects whose work can be seen in towns, villages and country estates all around these parts. His work at Dallam c1826 (for Lt.-Col. George (Smyth) Wilson and wife Sarah) was to be the third and most emphatic phase in the house’s evolution.

see: Chris West @ Flickr

Edward Wilson’s son Daniel rebuilt the core of the present house 1720-22 in brick, incorporating much of the existing C17 panelling and mullion windows. A century on, ‘Dallam had an untidy cluster of minor buildings around it when George Webster was brought in to pull the composition together.’¹ The architect duly ‘aggrandized the house, rendering the brick to imitate stonework,’ adding the Tuscan porch and those extended pavilions to produce the ‘substantial, gracious and symmetrical country house’ we see today.² The listing text notes that the ‘interior is extremely fine’; Dallam isn’t open to the public but one person at least has had access to provide these little-viewed images.

see: Chris West @ Flickr

Many portraits adorn Dallam, hopefully still some by the great George Romney. Again demonstrating a readiness to support local talent, it was early patronage by the Wilsons – here’s one tender study – that would help to establish the artist, propelling him from Kendal to London where ‘in the 1760s he was exceeded only by Gainsborough and Reynolds in the number of his fashionable sitters.’³

see: Chris West @ Flickr

From the rear we can appreciate not only the scale of the pre-Webster house of Daniel Wilson but also what is the jewel in Dallam’s crown, its wrought-iron glasshouse. This scintillating early survivor is also attributed to George Webster but is straight out of the pattern book of C19 gardening guru J.C. Loudon and was certainly built by D & W Bailey,

see: Country Life Picture Library

the London firm to whom Loudon effectively gifted his innovative designs.
If it occurs to you that maintaining this structure must be a bit of pain, you’d be right: 9000 panes, to be exact. Visiting the garden in 2005, Country Life learned from Susie Villiers-Smith* how the whole thing has to be meticulously taken apart, cleaned and reassembled every five years.

And while the house itself remains private the extensive, re-emergent gardens at Dallam Tower, ‘quietly off the beaten track..full of beauty and historic interest,’† can be visited. Look sharp, mind, it’s only for one day (May 20) and only for three hours…

(* How they are related: Rupert Villiers-Smith and his wife took on the Dallam estate following the death in 2001 of his grandfather Brig. Charles Tryon-Wilson. Villiers-Smith’s aunt married Sir Geoffrey Palmer, 12th Bt., present incumbent of another house previously featured here, Carlton Curlieu Hall in Leicestershire.)

¹ Taylor, Angus. The Websters of Kendal, 2004.
² Hyde, M., Pevsner, N. The buildings of England: Cumbria, 2010.
³ Gascoigne, B. Encyclopaedia of Britain, 1994.
† Longville, T. Country Life 5 Aug 2005.

Melbury House, Dorset

Downton Abbey – the Board Game? Given the ongoing international success of this TV drama/franchise, it’s surely not such an implausible spin-off. In fact, Handed on has long thought that the whirligig of aristocratic fortune offers much scope for this kind of diversion: ‘Chasing Your Entail’ – hours of fun for all the family! In reality, of course, the twists and turns of inheritance and entitlements can prove to be anything but, as the Parkers/Earls of Macclesfield have found and Somersets/Lords Raglan may yet. The dynamic of Downton Abbey (Series One) – the lack and/or premature demise of male heirs, and the significance of daughters of the house find echoes in the history of Melbury House and the Ilchester Estate. And if that imagined board game were to exist one person you probably wouldn’t want to find yourself playing against is Melbury’s present owner, who is not, these days…

source: Google Streetview

…an Earl of Ilchester.
Robin Fox-Strangways, 10th earl of that ilk, lives on this road in rural Warwickshire and not, as the first seven of his predecessors had, at the Grade-I house which sits at the heart of the 15,000-acre Ilchester Estate.

Mike Searle @ geograph

The peerless hexagonal belvedere that crowned Giles Strangways ‘remarkable’¹ Tudor house of c.1530 still overlooks ‘surely the most beautiful deer park in England’² despite the rest of the original building being ‘tantalizingly obscured’¹ by a fashionable 1690s Baroque remodelling. (The house would be gratuitously enlarged again in the C19 by Salvin and Devey.)

source: Google Streetview

Michael Patterson @ geograph

The aforesaid 10th earl might compare notes with George Monckton-Arundell, 12th Viscount Galway, who lives on this road in suburban Canada and not, as his first nine predecessors had, at the ancestral seat…

…Grade-1 Serlby Hall set in 3000 acres of north Nottinghamshire, created by architect James Paine for the 1st Viscount in 1751. In fact, both house and land would be sold off between 1981-91 as rather surplus to requirements for, over the course of the previous 20 years, the slings and arrows of fortune conspired such that the Ilchester and Galway estates had devolved to just one woman…

…the present Mrs Charlotte Townshend, who happens to turn 57 this very day.

The premature death at just 41 of the 9th Viscount Galway in 1971 would see the decoupling of title and estate, Charlotte, his only child, ultimately inheriting the latter (the title going to a series of cousins). Galway was married to Teresa Fox-Strangways who had similarly benefitted as the only surviving child of the 7th Earl of Ilchester (having tragically lost her two brothers before she was 27) following his death in 1964. She would die in 1989 with daughter Charlotte duly becoming principal beneficiary of the Ilchester estate.

see: Alwyn Ladell @ flickr

But all this was nothing new for Melbury. After the demise of the Strangways male line in 1726, ‘inheritance by two heiresses in succession meant that women played an unusually important part in shaping the destiny of [this] house and estate in the 18th century.‘³ The big headline from last year’s Country Life Succession Survey – ‘Daughters are beginning to inherit‘ – shows Melbury has long been ahead of this curve.

Uncannily foreshadowing the tragedies which would befall the 7th Earl over 200 years later, C18th heiress Susanna Strangways’ two sons died young leaving just a daughter, Elizabeth. In engineering Elizabeth’s marriage at 13 years of age to the son of Sir Stephen Fox (‘one of the great arrivistes of the C17th’†) Susanna would unwittingly gold-plate the Ilchester inheritance, a cousinly connection with the Foxs/Lords Holland subsequently yielding the Holland House estate.

This property now amounts to a mere 20-odd acres but they – more so even than 15,000 glorious acres of Dorset – explain how private Melbury and its vast park ‘have been kept up as well and as fully as in the past’.² And more directly they account for Charlotte Townshend’s Rich List ranking which, at £342m, is some way north of, er, the Queen’s.

‘The tranquility made it difficult for us to realize we were in the centre of London,‘ wrote James Lees-Milne in 1942; ‘How important it is to preserve this sanctuary.‘†† And so it came to pass that the grounds of bombed-out Holland House at the western end of Kensington High Street became the public amenity that is Holland Park and the eponymous neighbourhood abutting it amongst the most valuable and exclusive in London. Monopoly, anyone?

[Ilchester Estates][Listing]

¹ Pevsner, N. and Newman, R. The buildings of England: Dorset. 1975
² Cecil, David. Some Dorset country houses. 1985
³ Martin, Joanna. Wives and daughters: Women & children in the Georgian country house. 2004
† Beckett, J.V. The aristocracy in England 1660-1914. 1986
†† Lees-Milne, James. Some country houses and their owners. 1975

Thorpe Malsor Hall, Northamptonshire

In 1528 a lawyer called Edward Montagu acquired the manor of Boughton a mile or so north-east of the town of Kettering. He would occupy the medieval manor house, H-plan with a five-bay hall and two cross-wings. ‘By the late C16th it was one of the largest houses in the county,’¹ but they didn’t stop there, oh no. The Montagus aristocratic ascent would reach ducal heights by 1705 and their architectural aspirations were no less ambitious, Boughton ultimately assuming its spectacularly palatial dimensions with superlative contents to match. If a time-travelling Montagu were to return today he would need help finding what remains of the house as he knew it. Quite whether the present-day head of the family would be on hand to do the honours is uncertain, however, as Boughton is but one of three massive piles the Duke of Buccleuch can call home. Meanwhile, across town…

Thorpe Malsor Hall c.1900

In 1622 a lawyer called John Maunsell acquired the manor of Thorpe Malsor, a mile or so due west of Kettering. He would occupy the Jacobean manor house, ‘a development of the medieval H-plan with a central hall and two cross-wings.’¹ Now if Maunsell were to reappear at the entrance front today he probably wouldn’t have…

source: Bing Maps

..too much trouble recognizing the old place and would likely be assured of a greeting from his descendants, whose home Thorpe Malsor Hall remains. Another little-chronicled noteworthy survivor, house and church still compose a quintessential scene of parochial authority south of the lane which swings down into and up out of the tiny village of Thorpe Malsor. Unlike their aspirant neighbours on the other side of town, the Maunsells would retain the classic profile of the ‘lesser gentry’ with a pedigree dotted with the respected professions (and an estate agent), the odd MP and serial inter-marriage with a few Northamptonshire families of similar standing.

Externally, the single significant ‘modernisation’ of the old manor has been that plain ashlar south face of bow-leavened austerity. Dated 1817, this major modification actually happened during the shortest of all the Maunsell tenures, that of William, Archdeacon of Kildare (1815-18), who was sandwiched between two of the longest, Thomas Cecil (60+ years in residence) and Thomas Philip (48 yrs).

see source

‘At the same time the interior was modernized, and there are very few remains of ancient work left inside,‘ noted one 1930s visitor.² ‘But the house is full of old objects..many portraits by painters of renown some of which, with other things, came from Rushton, for the Maunsells intermarried with the Cokaynes of [that G1 house, now a hotel] more than once.’

The unbroken run of male Maunsell heirs to the estate came to an end with the sudden death of Maj. Cecil John Cokayne Maunsell in 1948. The female line has since predominated and the Hall is presently home to the Holborows, the Major’s great-granddaughter and her husband*. Somewhat ironically for a property which was last on the market in 1622, the latter works for premier estate agent Savills where he heads up – you’ve guessed – the country house sales department…

see: Google Streetview

[Listing]

* How they are related: Holborow’s aunt is chatelaine of another house already featured here, Haines Hill in the rural Berkshire parish of Hurst. John, the first Maunsell of Thorpe Malsor, was married to Katherine, daughter of Sir Richard Ward of..Hurst in Berkshire.

1. Heward, John and Taylor, Robert. The country houses of Northamptonshire. RCHM, 1996
2. Gotch, J.A. Squires’ homes and other old buildings of Northamptonshire. Batsford, 1939.

Woodhouse, Shropshire

On 28 June 1764 one Hugh Owen MD was ‘gored to death by a favourite bull’. On such random happenstance can the fate of an estate sometimes swing. It’s safe to say that without that excitable beast’s dramatic intervention (and the chain of inheritance it set in train) this restrained Georgian mansion, the wholly private home of the Mostyn-Owens since 1773, would not exist.

source: The Genealogy of the Marches

And under-exposed Woodhouse would provide the backdrop for two striking daughters of the house – a century-and-a-half apart – to enrapture a pair of subsequently noteable young bucks: One would become a scientific revolutionary whose mere name, Darwin, would come to embody his transformative thinking; the other would become, well, Boris Johnson.

William Mostyn would be the eventual beneficiary of the will of Miss Sarah Owen, adopting the name and losing little time developing his inheritance. He had already come into the Mostyn family’s Welsh estate, Bryngwyn, and engaged architect Robert Mylne to create a new house there. When the large and valuable Woodhouse estate dropped into his lap in 1772 he took the opportunity to consolidate his interests¹ and returned to Mylne with a second, grander, full-house commission for the place which would soon become the family’s primary locus.

source²

One writer has posited that in Robert Mylne ‘can be found the nearest example of the pure neo-classic architect who practised in Britain’.² Which, by extension, would make Woodhouse something of a dark horse contender for the most complete and unadulterated exemplar of the Neoclassical style. Though never as fashionable or celebrated as his direct contemporary Robert Adam – both attended Edinburgh High School and would cross paths repeatedly over several formative years touring in Europe -

source²

the industrious Mylne had an avid fan-club in Shropshire, being the go-to guy for the county’s landed gentry from about 1766. The expressly restrained 16-bedroom mansion Mylne designed for William Mostyn-Owen’s new English dominion features ‘exciting and unusual effects such as the stair hall’² while the dramatic portico – reckoned by Pevsner ‘a very curious and original composition’ – showed that ‘occasionally he could design something as strikingly original as anything by Soane.’.³

But it wasn’t the fascinating architecture which would attract a young Charles Darwin here as often as possible between university terms. ‘Woodhouse is to me a paradise, about which I am always thinking’, (a) he would write in 1828. County neighbours, Charles and his sisters appreciated the relatively jolly household of the multitudinous Mostyn-Owen brood. And one in particular, ‘la belle Fanny‘(b), would preoccupy Charles, the pair spending long days in each others company and exchanging letters when apart.

see: Wikimapia

‘Why did you not come home this Xmas.. I suppose some dear little Beetles kept you away. If I could have found a Scrofulum morturorum perhaps you might have been induced to come down!‘(c), teased Fanny in 1830. (Always keen to engage with nature, another Darwin passion at this time was shooting, his zeal ensuring the survival of only the fittest of Woodhouse’s pheasants.)

Fanny, however, was a very popular girl, never short of ‘gallant attention’, and dropped a bombshell at the end of 1831. ‘You will be as much astonished as Caroline was when Fanny told her she was engaged to Mr Biddulph; he had proposed and been accepted in the course of a secret ride’ (d), Charles’s other sister Catherine informed Darwin who was but a few weeks into the epic voyage on The Beagle which would eventually make his name. Robert Biddulph was heir to Chirk Castle just 10 miles to the north and came with a rakish reputation: ‘I cannot help hoping that with such an attaching wife as Fanny he will reform, and become tolerably domestic’, Catherine added.

see: Dafydd Jones

Fast-forward 150 years and Woodhouse would again resound to expressions of astonishment and doubt at the undergraduate engagement of ‘Oxford goddess’ Allegra Mostyn-Owen and the chaotically ambitious Boris Johnson. Although the boat was duly pushed out at a Woodhouse reception recalled as ‘La Dolce Vita meets Brideshead’, misgivings abounded. Boris was ‘rapacious’ said his father-in-law; she’s ‘nuts’, said hers.† ‘I got declarations of love every day. Boris seemed like a safe place.. but not for long,’ a chastened (and long-divorced) Allegra would tell the Daily Mail in 2008.

When he died in May 2011 William Mostyn-Owen had been master of Woodhouse for well over 60 years, inheriting at just 18 having lost his two elder brothers in WWII. For a moment in the early ’80s he considered selling the 1,500-acre estate in favour of another family property in Perthshire. But it was Aberuchill Castle that eventually went on the market ensuring that the Owens’ 400-year association with this place would continue and Woodhouse become a Handed on qualifier of the highest rank…

¹ Humphreys, T.M. Bryngwyn: A study of the impact of family settlements, extravagence and debt on a Welsh estate. Montgomeryshire Collections Vol. 75 (1987)

² Gotch, Christopher. Mylne and Adam. Architectural Review Feb 1956.

³ Colvin, Howard. A biographical dictionary of British architects 1600-1840, 1995.

† Purnell, Sonia. Just Boris: The irresistible rise of a political celebrity, Aurum Press, 2011.

Goings on up at the Hall

Being a brief update on some places previously featured here…

[Shuckburgh Hall]
With ongoing deliberations over a proposed wind farm, more immediately a temporary 70m wind monitoring mast atop Beacon Hill on the estate – turned down by the local council on first hearing – the opponents’ website updated interested parties:

‘The Planning Inspector assigned to the Appeal gave notice that a site visit at Shuckburgh Park will take place during the week commencing 23 January. People from neighbouring properties who asked to have a site visit at their properties by the Inspector have been invited to attend the site visit on 24th January.’

Quite whether this went ahead as planned is unclear since a notice in the Daily Telegraph on January 27 informed us that:

Sir Rupert Charles Gerald Shuckburgh, 13th Baronet of Shuckburgh Hall, Upper Shuckburgh, born 12th February 1949, died peacefully in hospital following a long illness on 24th January.

see: Central Horse News

In the context of an estate as venerable and low-key as this one, epochal times indeed. Since Handed on began, the single most clicked-on link posted here – and by some distance – is this photo of Sir Rupert at Napton horse show. A man of rank who sought no public profile but whose inheritance engendered a degree of public interest. His son James, 34, steps up as 14th bart…

[Thorpe Hall]
Meanwhile, up in the East Riding of Yorkshire, we left Sir Ian Bosville Macdonald fighting an energy-related battle from the opposite direction. The 17th bart was holding out against Centrica’s desire to exploit the geology of his estate which is apparently ideal for the natural storage of thousands of tonnes of gas. Alas for Sir Ian, the Department of Energy were persuaded of the company’s case and duly invoked it’s power of last resort:

‘The new rights to be purchased compulsorily in, on, over, under and through land in this order are described in the Schedule and shown edged red and coloured blue on the said maps.’ Er..

source: Centrica

Racing news:

Drama on the gallops at Alscot Park last month where estate-based racehorse trainer Robin Dickin came a cropper:

Ash Midcalf@Panoramio

‘Robin had a major crash when one of the horses tripped & turned A over T and landed on top of him – never good! The next hour involved paramedics – on the gamekeeper’s quad bike – & the air ambulance. The outcome is a fractured neck & shoulder blade. To walk away is extremely lucky’. [more]

(On Feb 28, Emma Holman-West’s Alscot Estate
will collect the RASE Bledisloe Gold Medal for outstanding achievement in estate management. See an exquisite Ash Midcalf pic of this most ravishing of houses here.)

Meanwhile, Henry Daly’s racing stables on the Downton Hall estate has gone and spoiled the outro to Handed on‘s original post by finally getting a website together. But the bonus is an ever-so-slightly closer view of the brick GII*-listed Hall’s east face…

[Welbeck Abbey]
Whilst omitting mention of winning the ‘Best Secret Tunnel’ category in Tatler magazine’s skittish Country House Awards, at the end of January owner William Parente gave Country Life readers an update of life at Welbeck. Handed on is heading there in June for an event this blog would seem to be anticipating a tad more keenly than it’s host: “Then, next summer, a mini-music festival, bizarrely called No Direction Home. I sincerely hope there is“.

Cycling in Welbeck

Parente goes on to recount their recent embarrassment at having the local fire brigade turn out when a guest burnt some toast in the Dualit. Welbeck house guests having to make their own breakfast? Goes to show you just can’t get the staff these days…

[Read 'The art of managing an estate']

Ryston Hall, Norfolk

That the name of this place does not ring with the familiarity it perhaps ought is all of a piece with that of its original creator and occupant. Which would be of no especial remark but for the fact that this was the house and home of a man described as the most successful architect between Inigo Jones and Wren, a man who had authored “one of the most influential buildings in the history of English domestic architecture“.¹ Ryston Hall is not that building; Sir Roger Pratt is that architect.

Norfolk Historic Buildings Group

And the surprise that Ryston, one of just two extant houses we can definitely associate with the country’s first architectural knight and which would later be significantly altered by Messrs. Soane and Salvin, is not Grade I-listed (it’s G.II*) is only matched (and in a way explained?) by the fruits of such a trinity being outwardly so unprepossessing.

source: Ben Harris

Just south of Downham Market, Ryston Hall and its park were laid out on land which had come to this family in the mid-C16. And while Sir Roger’s three children would predecease him and the estate pass to a kinsman, Edward Pratt, thenceforth, for the past 300 years (bar a ‘brother’ in 1863) Ryston has passed from one eldest son to the next. No female line, name-changing or hyphenations needed here, no sir; it’s been one bona fide Pratt after another. And yet, and yet…

‘It is one of the drawbacks of primogeniture that many a man who, left to follow his natural genius, would have been historically famous, is stopped and dragged into agriculture by succeeding to an estate in land.’² So lamented the author of the first substantive attempt to rehabilitate Pratt’s reputation, overlooking the minor detail that he had in fact inherited from a cousin. But this event certainly did mark the beginning of the end of the meteoric rise of Sir Roger Pratt, gentleman architect.

Seemingly destined for a career in law, a financial inheritance from his father enabled the young Roger Pratt to swap life at the Inner Temple for a study tour of Europe, neatly ducking most of the Civil War for the civility of immersion in Continental classicism. The tour would last six years.

source: Country Life

Pratt returned to England in 1649 brimming with inspiration but how was a chap to get a start? As luck would have it a cousin, Sir George Pratt, was in the process of putting up a house for himself in Oxfordshire; whatever shape this was taking heretofore would soon be overtaken by Roger’s impressively informed direction (an aged Inigo Jones consulting). Pratt’s deft incorporation of classical form and function into the English tradition was his masterstroke and ‘epitomised the needs and aspirations of his own class, the gentry’.³ Coleshill House (right) was an immediate hit and commissions quickly rolled in.

source: Wikipedia

Kingston Hall (later Kingston Lacy) in Dorset and Horseheath Hall, Cambridgeshire would precede the momentous but ill-starred Clarendon House in Piccadilly (left) for controversial Lord Chancellor of the day, Edward Hyde. In spite of the Plague, politics and ballooning costs Pratt created what Pepys called ‘the finest pile I ever did see in my life’. Soon after it’s completion Hyde fled into exile in France and Clarendon would be pulled down 16 years later. For Pratt it was quite literally out of the frying pan and into the Fire. London’s great calamity of 1666 would next see him appointed senior to Wren in the three-man supervisory commission to rebuild the City, service for which he would be knighted in 1668. Meanwhile, a year earlier he had inherited Ryston.

see: Gunther (from a painting at Ryston)

Sir Roger’s last architectural essay, the house he would build for himself, was a relatively modest affair, ‘oddly provincial after his more famous and celebrated houses‘ (Pevsner). A century after his death, Edward Roger Pratt would inherit Ryston and invite coming man John Soane, a Grand Tour acquaintance, to modernise the Hall. Soane was clearly not overawed by Sir Roger’s reputation, proceeding to obliterate

see source

all but the main walls in a radical remodelling of Ryston. The present owner’s father expressed regret at Soane’s changes, a view Piers Pratt shared until apparently enlightened on a tour of his own house by architect Ptolemy Dean.

Soane could perhaps be forgiven for having taken such a seemingly unregarding approach to his makeover of Ryston (which would again be further altered in the early C20). After all, he would have been looking back at a man who had created just five houses, the most celebrated of which had already been demolished. Horseheath Hall stood until 1792 while Kingston Lacy would experience a similar fate to Ryston at the hands of Sir Charles Barry. Most recently, Coleshill House – ‘a statement of the utmost value to British architecture‘ (Summerson†) – was gutted by fire in 1952 and subsequently demolished. So it is that Pratt’s legacy exists largely in theory – but at least he has left us plenty of that:

‘If the locks on the casements of great windows stand so high that women and short folk cannot reach them, some handle bending downwards may be added to remedy all such inconvenience’.²

Top tip, Sir Roger!

see: Google Streetview

[Ryston Hall Estate]

¹ Colvin, H. A biographical dictionary of British architects 1600-1840 (1995)
² Gunther, R.T. The architecture of Sir Roger Pratt (1928)
³ Silcox-Crowe, N. The architectural outsiders Ed. by Roderick Brown (1985)
† Hill, O. & Cornforth, J. English country houses: Caroline 1625-1685 (1966)