Esher Place
| Esher Place | |
| Surrey | |
|---|---|
 Esher Place | |
| Location | |
| Grid reference: | TQ13376491 |
| Location: | 51°22’19"N, 0°22’22"W |
| Village: | Esher |
| History | |
| Built 1890s | |
| For: | Edgar Vincent by George Thomas Robinson and Achille Duchêne |
| Country house | |
| Information | |
| Condition: | Converted to a trade union college |
| Owned by: | Unite, The Union |
Esher Place is a country house in Esher in Surrey. The building is at least the fourth on approximately the same site and mainly dates to the 1890s. It incorporates traces and small parts of some its earlier forebears.
The house is a Grade-II listed building.[1]
Since 1953, Esher Place has used as a training college by a trade union, now 'Unite'.
History
The first recorded predecessor of the house was acquired by or for Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester, for his bishopric, early in the 13th century. The house was torn down in the latter half of the 15th century by William Waynflete, Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor, to make way for a large brick residence (with a tall slender tower gatehouse (Waynflete's Tower, see below) that stands today).
Cardinal Wolsey, who possessed Esher Place as Bishop of Winchester, was kept under house arrest here after his fall from power. The estate was then seized by Henry VIII, restored to the Bishop of Winchester by Queen Mary I, and the lease was then re-purchased by the Crown under Elizabeth I, who granted it to her Lord High Admiral, Lord Howard of Effingham, who granted it to Sir Francis Drake's cousin Richard Drake. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada, three captured Spanish admirals and their retinue were held at Esher for over five years.
The estate remained in the Drake family until 1634. Over the next 75 years, the house which had more land than today was held by at least seven individuals, the last two being Sir Thomas Lynch, an early Governor of Jamaica, and John Latton, a pluralistic office-holder under King William III.
In 1716, the wider agricultural estate was separated from Esher Place and the house was sold to Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st Duke of Newcastle, who owned Claremont in the same parish. The house (and immediate grounds), passed through two owners, including Peter Delaperte, one of the directors of the South Sea Company, and came into the ownership of the Duke's younger brother, Henry Pelham, in 1729. Pelham hired William Kent to renovate the property who did so by having demolished much of the mediæval and Tudor portions — except for the gatehouse — and adding wings and some of the earliest Gothic revival ornamentation in Britain.
In his work The Seasons, the poet James Thomson (author of the lyrics to Rule, Britannia!) praises
| “ | Esher's peaceful grove/Where Kent and Nature vie for Pelham's love...Where, in the sweetest solitude embraced, by the soft windings of the gentle Mole, from courts and senates Pelham finds repose.".[2] | ” |
The family of the owners of Esher Place had by that right the privilege of using one half of the 'Newcastle Pew' at St George's Church, Esher. After Pelham's death, the property passed to his daughter, and was then purchased in 1805 by London merchant John Spicer.
Spicer pulled down the house and used the material to build another, designed by Edward Lapidge,[3] on a more elevated site. The new house was stuccoed, in imitation of stone, with Ionic porticoes on north and south fronts, and semi-circular wings.[4] In the late 1890s, this building was then incorporated as a wing into the current French Renaissance style house on the site, designed by George Thomas Robinson and Achille Duchêne at the behest of Edgar Vincent, later 1st Lord D'Abernon. Vincent had purchased the much-reduced estate in 1895 from Money Wigram, who had bought it from the Spicer heirs. Vincent — Lord D'Abernon after 1914 — had guests including the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII), Cecil Rhodes, and Anna Pavlova.
However, in 1930 Lord D'Abernon gave the house to the Ragged School Union later the Shaftesbury Society, while most of the grounds were sold to developers who built the very upper-crust housing estate which now surrounds the mansion.[5] The house became the Shaftesbury Home for young children from 1930 until 1952, when it was sold to the Electrical Trades Union (now merged into Unite the Union), which opened it in 1953 as the college it remains today.
Waynflete's Tower
- Main article: Wayneflete Tower
Waynflete's Tower is a grade-I listed[6] gatehouse, originally built at the same time as the late 15th-century house, but much modified by William Kent following Henry Pelham's purchase of the property. Kent designed the additions of the two three-bay ranges of three stories to each side and the one-story porch between the turrets with ogee-arched doorway, triple window above with ogee-headed lights (window spaces), and quatrefoil windows. The rib-vaulted entrance hall was the gateway in Wayneflete's time which Kent had stuccoed or plastered over.[2] The Tower is currently a residence.[7]
Waynflete's Tower was also the subject of a 2006 episode of archaeological television programme Time Team.[8]
Outside links
References
- ↑ National Heritage List 1377431: Esher Place
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Nairn (2002), p. 222-23.
- ↑ Template:DNB
- ↑ Prosser, G.F. (1828). Select Illustrations of the County of Surrey. London. https://books.google.com/books?id=4PcGAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover. Retrieved 24 July 2011.
- ↑ Website Template:Webarchive with historical information
- ↑ National Heritage List 1286940: Wayneflete Tower
- ↑ Website for the tower
- ↑ Website discussing Time Team investigation
- Nikolaus Pevsner: The Buildings of England: Surrey, 1962; 1971 Penguin Books ISBN 978-0-300-09675-0
- National Monuments Record: No. 397606 – Esher Place
