In 1761, Henry Blundell was given control of the Ince Blundell estate by his father. He had recently married Elizabeth Mostyn and the couple settled into the mansion house, which had been built earlier in the century. Blundell was an avid collector, with the funds to indulge his passion, and after his wife’s early death he spent time in Italy before returning to Ince Blundell to build two temples ‘purposely for the reception of statuary’.

Blundell (1724-1810) had become very wealthy thanks to family bequests and Ince Blundell was home to an impressive collection of Old Master and modern paintings. What was lacking was a fine collection of Roman statuary, so in 1776 he set off for Italy to join his friend, fellow collector and fellow Catholic, Charles Townley. With advice from Townley, and a network of contacts, he went on something of a shopping spree. Blundell returned to Italy in subsequent years, and also continued to buy works privately and at auction in Britain, quickly running out of space to display the works.

Blundell’s solution was to display sculpture in a complex of garden buildings fronted by a classical pedimented temple. This was connected to a greenhouse and an octagonal room, all of which were filled with sculpture as well as plants (the tithe map of 1843 shows this substantial range of buildings). The temple carries a Greek inscription, shown in the engraving above, which is usually translated as ‘here spring is eternal and it is summer in months not its own’ – i.e. the heated glasshouses allowed plants to flourish in all seasons (this inscription also appears on the orangery in Clapham).

The temple is attributed to the Liverpool architect William Everard (1723-1792) on the evidence that a portrait of the architect showed him with ‘the plan in his hand’, pointing to the completed structure (the portrait was shown at a lecture in Liverpool in 1869, but its current whereabouts are unknown). The temple was extant by February 1790 when it is shown in a drawing (see below). In that same year the Polish princess Isabel Czartoryska visited – she was not impressed by the combination of sculpture and verdure. She complained that Ince was a ‘storehouse of various objects gathered without taste or choice. Plenty of ugly statues and many sarcophagi, so called antique, positioned among the geraniums in the hot houses’.

Blundell soon needed still more space, and in 1801 he discussed the creation a new gallery with Townley. He commissioned a wooden model (sadly lost) of the planned ‘room’, which took the form of a rotunda modelled on the pantheon in Rome.

Like the original, the building was top-lit although, this being Lancashire, it was glazed. When complete it was used to house his ‘choicest specimens’ and one visitor recorded how his ‘eye roved in admiration from figure to figure’. Blundell had boasted that many of the buildings on his estate were to his own design, and he may have designed this building himself, using an executant architect/mason named briefly in the surviving accounts as Hope.

Blundell carefully catalogued his collection and in 1803 he published a handlist of the works in the house and both temples, followed in 1809 by a lavish two-volume illustrated work.

Originally the pantheon was freestanding, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it was connected to the house via a single storey link.

Whilst Blundell understandably favoured classical buildings in which to display the sculpture collection, there was a gothic ornament in his park. Sometime before 1786 a prospect tower was erected east of the house (it is shown on Yates’s map of the County Palatine of Lancaster published in that year). Described in 1823 as the ‘observatory’, it was said to ‘command a very extensive view’.

Named on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps as ‘Blundell Tower’, it disappeared early in the next century and is known only from two artworks. The drawing above, formerly at Stonor Park (once home to Blundell’s son-in-law), is a great record of the lost tower. National Museums Liverpool was able to purchase this view for the city’s collection at Christies in 1992. The tower also appears in a painting by Charles Towne of Blundell’s horse, Duchess (private collection).

James Lees-Milne, Historic Buildings Secretary of the National Trust, visited Ince, a ‘romantic Papist establishment’ in August 1947. By that date the house had descended to the Weld family, who had added the name Blundell.  Lees-Milne found the Pantheon ‘marvellous’, and thought the displays at Ince Blundell must be the ‘finest statuary collections left in private hands’. That ownership was not to last: in 1959 the family presented many of the sculptures to the city of Liverpool, and a year later the house was sold to the Augustinian Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, to be used as a care home.

Although the art world was relieved that the works were to be preserved as a single collection, there was sadness that it could not remain, as Geoffrey Grigson wrote, in ‘the delightful setting which Henry Blundell devised for it’. A group of ‘distinguished members of the Georgian Group’ wrote to the Times expressing their dismay that the collection was to be removed. Writing in response, Vere E. Cotton, former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, explained that the Liverpool Corporation had only decided on removing the collection with ‘extreme reluctance’. The corporation had explored constructing a new access to the Pantheon, taking a long lease on the temple and even taking down the Pantheon and rebuilding it in a Liverpool park. But none of the options was feasible.

Only a fraction of the sculpture collection can be seen in Liverpool today, with the majority of the works inaccessible in store. The Walker Art Gallery has a selection of the eighteenth century copies from Ince Blundell on display, but the city’s World Museum has no works on show,

But there is some very good news. Ince Blundell recently became a respite centre where unpaid carers can take a break and relax. As well as ensuring a future for the house, and providing a wonderful resource for the local area, this new use means that public access is possible, and pre-booked guided tours are available (and highly recommended).

The tour includes the Pantheon, which is now bare of sculpture, although some of the niches still display the catalogue number assigned by Blundell. The interior is in reasonable condition, but sadly the reliefs mounted on the exterior are badly degraded.

The Garden Temple can also be seen, but the attached greenhouse is long gone (ruins of the furthest room can be seen, although this was later remodelled as part of a range of glasshouses). The temple was restored in the late 1990s, but damp is an ongoing problem. Some wall-mounted works can still be admired, but the free-standing statuary has been removed.

The vast sculpture collection is listed in Blundell’s own publications, and more recently it has been discussed in depth in the volumes of The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture, published from 1991.

House, Pantheon and Temple are listed at grade II*. The park is grade II* registered. Ince Blundell is north of Liverpool and, although originally in Lancashire, it became part of the new county of Merseyside in 1974. You can find Ince Blundell visitor information here. 

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Surrounded by a twentieth century housing estate in south London, this classical building comes as something of a surprise. The Orangery, as it is known today, was once a feature of the pleasure grounds of Robert Thornton’s house on the edge of Clapham Common.

Thornton (1759-1826), an MP and businessman, had inherited a substantial fortune from his merchant father, John Thornton (1720-1790). Robert’s house stood in a small landscaped park with lakes, and in around 1792 he added this elegant building. Over the door is an inscription from Virgil which gives a clue as to the purpose of the fine structure: HIC VER ASSIDUUM ATQUE ALIENIS MENSIBUS AESTAS, which translates as ‘Here is eternal spring and summer in months not her own’, or ‘Tis here eternal spring and summer all the year’: the building was a greenhouse, where tender plants could be kept alive in the colder months of the year.

The artist Joseph Farington visited in 1806, with his friend William Wilberforce, and noted in his diary that the Orangery was built to a design by Dr Burgh of York. William Burgh (1741-1808) was Irish-born, but lived in York for many years. He doesn’t seem to have a history as an amateur architect, but he was a friend of the poet and garden designer William Mason, and wrote a commentary to accompany the 1783 edition of Mason’s poem The English Garden. In this text Burgh wrote that Mason’s lines about a greenhouse ‘where rare and alien plants/might safely flourish’ was inspired by the French writer and landscape designer René Louis Girardin. Girardin published De La Composition des Paysages in 1777, in which he suggested that a greenhouse with a background of trees would form a ‘jolie tableau‘. Girardin’s concept and Mason’s lines were brought to life in Clapham.

Long since lost is a marble tablet which was inside the building. It was inscribed with an extract from William Cowper’s poem The Task, including these lines which echo the quotation from Virgil on the frieze:

Unconscious of a less propitious clime,
There blooms exotic beauty, warm and snug,
While the winds whistle, and the snows descend.

The pediment is decorated with what are believed to be Coade stone ornaments. In the engraving (above) the central plaque appears to feature a profile, but if that was the case it has disappeared, and it is not known who or what it represented (by the mid-20th century the oval space was a window which lit the attic behind the pediment). The Greenhouse, as it was originally known, had a view of a serpentine canal and lawns and then over a haha to the meadows and another serpentine lake beyond. The Greenhouse was originally furnished with huge sash windows, with curious glazing between the columns – rather like stretcher bond in brickwork (see the photo’ below).

In 1808 Queen Charlotte, the Princesses and the Dukes of Cumberland and Cambridge visited the Thorntons at their ‘Clapham Villa’, and were shown the Greenhouse, but soon after Thornton got into financial difficulties. The Thornton Estate was offered for sale in 1810 when it was described as a ‘most superb villa’ with gardens full of native and exotic species ‘now in the highest state of cultivation’. The map in the sales particulars shows the ‘Greenhouse’ overlooking one of the serpentine lakes.

The estate was on the market again in 1851 when the ‘beautiful conservatory of Portland stone’ was described as ‘commanding views over the pleasure grounds and rich meadow land, which presents the appearance of a small park’.

The estate was bought by a Belgian order of nuns who established the Notre Dame convent and school on the site. New buildings were added, playing fields and tennis courts were laid out, and the girls could row on the serpentine lake and ride ponies in the grounds.

The convent closed in 1939 but its name lives on in the Notre Dame Estate, which was developed on the site of the convent and former Thornton gardens soon after the Second World War.

All that remains today of the pleasure grounds is the Orangery, which serves as an elegant backdrop to a recreation ground in the middle of the Notre Dame Estate. In the early 1950s the writer E.M. Forster, whose great-aunt Marianne was a Thornton, visited Clapham and found ‘no Thornton memorial except a dilapidated Orangery’. He was saddened that the site had been cleared ‘at a time when development was unusually ruthless’.

Unsurprisingly, the windows were the first casualty when the building stood empty, and today the rather forlorn building stands behind security fencing.

The Orangery has been largely without a purpose since the estate was constructed. Drawings by the Borough of Wandsworth Engineer, Surveyor and Architect show that the building was consolidated in 1955 when it was listed at Grade II, and it has had occasional remedial works ever since. The Orangery is on Historic England’s Buildings at Risk Register and, despite much debate and local support, a viable future for the structure remains to be found.

Update October 2025: Private Eye’s architecture correpsondent, ‘Piloti’, wrote about the orangery in the edition dated 17-30 October 2025. More than half of the roof has collapsed and Lambeth Council are seeking external funding to pay for repairs estimated to cost £100,000.

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Enville, together with Hagley and The Leasowes, was one of the triumvirate of famed eighteenth-century Midland estates. The seat of the Earl of Stamford, it was ornamented with a variety of features: some have disappeared over the years, but fortunately many survive. A number of regular readers were intrigued by the image of the exquisite Museum at Enville which appeared in these pages in April, and asked to know more. So the Folly Flâneuse asked The Garden Historian, aka Dr Michael Cousins, to explain its history…

Various contenders for designer of the unusual garden building have surfaced: Sanderson Miller, the gentleman (i.e. amateur) architect who favoured the Gothick style, for one. Discussion with his mason about ‘Ld Stamfords Green House’ was underway in October 1749 and he spent the rest of that month, and most of the next, drawing up a design. Miller (1716-1780), besides his own inclination to the ‘Gothick’, had a well-stocked library to call upon that included Batty Langley’s Ancient Architecture Restored and Improved (1741/2). This was a pattern book which builders and owners used for ideas, and may have provided inspiration. By June 1750 William Shenstone, the poet and acquaintance of Stamford, was able to note the new ‘Gothick Greenhouse’ at Enville.

By 1756 Miller’s building had been renamed, with the peregrinatious Dr Pococke noting an elegant ‘Gothick Summer house of Mr Millers design’. Clearly then the greenhouse and summerhouse were one and the same building, and although it has been suggested that the first incarnation of the greenhouse was a wooden structure, no evidence has come to light to support this.

Sandy Haynes, the former archivist at and authority on Enville also concludes that the greenhouse and summerhouse were two names for the same building, writing that: ‘Sanderson Miller’s name is mentioned by too many different sources to be discounted and although Pococke refers to it as a summer-house there is no other building at Enville that he could be describing.’ Sadly no records seem to survive in which the exact use of the building is noted, so we don’t know for sure if the building ever housed plants or was simply a pleasure pavilion, or dual purpose.

By 1770 the building had been repurposed as a billiard room. Joseph Heely’s guidebook of c.1773 described it as being fitted out with a billiard table, a chamber organ, and ‘the inside richly adorned with stucco, the cieling remarkably so’. This work is more difficult to date: Haynes believes that it was during the transition to billiard room that the building acquired its elaborate interior plasterwork, and this brings in another contender: Henry Keene (1726-1776). This rare photograph of the inside of the building as it was in March 1952 shows stucco work that bears a strong resemblance to that in the chapel at Hartlebury Castle in Worcestershire, which Keene refitted and reroofed in the Gothic style in around 1750.

The association between Miller and Henry Keene was strong, with the two working together at Hagley in Worcestershire, Chart Park in Surrey and at Arbury in Warwickshire (where Keene probably took up reins as architect following Miller’s deteriorating mental ill-health at the end of 1759) and it is possible that he undertook the interior work of Enville’s summerhouse. To add to the naming confusion the summerhouse was referred to as a ‘Gothic room’ in 1759, yet was still being called a greenhouse by a visitor as late as 1777.

In 1846, soon after the 7th Earl of Stamford inherited, it was refurbished as a Museum for the display of ‘shells, fossils and curiosities’, and that name has now stuck for almost two centuries. By the middle of the twentieth century the building had decayed significantly and its plight gained public attention. Ultimately the principal structure was restored and reroofed by William Hawkes of Cave-Browne-Cave architects in 1988-9. The interior awaits restoration.

There was another Gothic feature at Enville, a ‘Gothic Seat’ which is sometimes misinterpreted as Miller’s building. It is mentioned in a letter of 1754 from John Ivory Talbot of Lacock Abbey to Miller  ‘at Enville we saw an Horrid Massacre of a Fine Gothick design of yours: committed by the Hands of some Shrewsbury man…’ (it was an occasional hazard for architects to have their plans tweaked by owners or masons as soon as their backs were turned). Haynes believes it was the Gothic Seat sited at the west edge of Essex Wood that Talbot was referring to – no views survive, and it fails to get mentioned in any visitors’ accounts after 1759 and so probably disappeared soon after.

Enville is a private estate but opens very occasionally for special events. Keep an eye on their website for details https://envilleestate.com

Please get in touch if you have any thoughts or further information – scroll down to the bottom of the page to find the comments box. Please note that your email address will not be published – only your name will appear. Thank you for reading, and thank you to Michael for this guest post.