Restoring Soane’s house in the suburbs
The Times, 2/2/2013
By Simon Tait
Pitzhanger Manor in the heart of Ealing, west London, is the subject of a new £8m appeal to restore its daring 200-year-old architecture and reveal more rooms, which the chair of its new trust hopes will be complete by 2017.
Pitzhanger was the dream country home created for himself and his family by Sir John Soane, in his time England’s most celebrated architect, and it was also the scene of his ultimate nightmare.
In the 1760s it had been where he cut his professional teeth as the assistant to George Dance Junior, and when in his success and prosperity he was able to buy it in 1800 he swept away the non-Dance elements to create his own architectural laboratory where he would try out ideas and array his curious collections, which eventually went to his London home in Lincoln’s Inn fields, now the Sir John Soane Museum.
Dance had been commissioned by the ownerto build a new neo-classical wing to his early-18c house and 15-year-old Soane, the son of a bricklayer, was his assistant. The extension remains, but Soane’s building was both grandiose in its ambition and modest in its domestic size.
The breakfast room at the front of the house could almost be 1930s Moderne in its feeling and sombre colour scheme – restored in the 1980s in a well-researched restoration by the present owner, the London Borough of Ealing. The curved ceilings, inset mirrors, panelling and cupboards to conceal the less attractive necessities of domestic Georgian living give a sense of elegant cosiness which pervades the whole house.
With the house came 28 acres in which Soane loved to walk and fish with friends, who often had weekends there for the dinners John and Eliza Soane loved to give to show off their latest additions and acquisitions. Hogarth’s series The Rake’s Progress was first here alongside Canaletto’s The Grand Canal.
Soane was as devoted to nurturing future talent as his own practice. He was the Royal Academy’s professor of architecture and his pupils were expected to work 12 hours a day. Pitzhanger – Soane’s idiosyncratic spelling with a “z” has recently been officially adopted – was where Soane began to learn his art, and where he expected his sons, John and George (15 and 14 respectively in 1800), to do likewise. They both refused, seldom stayed at Pitzhanger, and the relationships were never better than acrimonious. The house was sold in 1810, Eliza dying five years later her heart having been broken, she said, by the behaviour of her younger son.
The house and grounds were later bought by Spencer Walpole for his sisters-in-law, the four unmarried daughters of the murdered prime minister Spencer Perceval. It stayed in their ownership for half a century, before it was acquired by the local authority in 1900 to be turned into a public library.
The council has decided to turn Pitzhanger into a centrepiece for a revived Ealing. To do so the Pitzhanger Manor Trust has been created to access sources of grants for which local authorities are not eligible. Its recently appointed chair is the former British ambassador to Afghanistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a local resident who became as Soane fan as an Oxford undergraduate.
“I’ve always thought the best things in life come completely unexpectedly,” he says. In 2011 he had his wedding at Pitzhanger, months before being asked to chair the trust. “It really is a dream project for a dream house in Ealing, ‘Queen of the Suburbs’ as we think of it. The great thing is that Crossrail is coming here so we’ll be 17 minutes to Farringdon in 2017. The Empire Cinema with its Grade I façade is being rebuilt nearby, and the Charles Jones town hall is being restored and cleaned. We are part of the renaissance of central Ealing.”
Eventually the trust, which hopes for charitable status soon, is expected to take over the full running of the manor. New research in the archives at the Soane Museum is helping lead architects Jestico & Whiles – in association with Julian Harrap, the long-time inspecting architects for the Soane Museum – to create the restoration plan being published this spring.
The scheme will not only reassess colours and wall covering, but restore and open up first floor inter-connecting rooms where only Soane’s bedrooms and the large drawing room have already been restored. The two boys’ rooms and Eliza’s bedroom will be added, the windows reset or removed if post-Soane and throughout the 20c century incursions, such as radiators, will be removed or concealed. 19th and 20th century additions will be removed.
Outside, the conservatory Soane built and which was lost in the 20th century is to be replaced; and in a different grant bid to the heritage Lottery fund Walpole Park is to be restored, with a modern toilet block behind Soane’s bridge removed along with overgrown trees to restore the view of Pitzhanger. Even the two majestic cedars Soane planted are to be restored.
“Soane was not as assiduous about writing about his own property as he was about his clients,” says Helen Walker, Pitzhanger’s manager, “but from the Soane Museum archive we are discovering a lot about the colour schemes he liked, the decoration and the elevations.”
The manor is not to become a kind of Soane Museum annexe, however. “The trust’s aim is to make it faithful to Soane but a resource,” says Cowper-Coles. “I came to Ealing to learn Pashtu before I went to Afghanistan, and this is the third most diverse borough in the country, so we want to make attractive to all of the communities here.
“Pitzhanger is also a contemporary art gallery, as it really was for Soane, and we will create a Grade A gallery so that we can have more precious exhibitions. It will be Soane’s house, but Soane’s house as we believe he would want it to be in the 21st century.”
