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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J.L Carr’s novel A Month in the Country won the Guardian Prize for Fiction in 1980. It is a short novel which tells the gentle and very moving story of two men re-establishing their lives after the horrors of serving in the First World War. It is a firm favourite of The Folly Flâneuse, and she was fascinated to discover recently that Carr was also an amateur artist, and his subjects were usually the buildings of his adopted county of Northamptonshire. His volumes of sketches and paintings include a number of architectural curiosities, accompanied by captions that reveal his warm sense of humour.

Joseph Lloyd Carr (but known as James, or Jim) was born in Yorkshire in 1912. His story has been told in some style by Byron Rogers but, in summary, he became a teacher and in 1951 settled in Kettering, Northamptonshire. Here, on Mill Dale Road, he established the Quince Tree Press, which published the distinctive little Pocket Books familiar from the most discerning bookshops. The subjects of these 16 page books include anthologies of poetry, a dictionary of extraordinary cricketers, and volumes of woodcuts; the best summary of the range is the QTP’s own: ‘there is a degree of unconventionality about all the productions’. The success of the press allowed Carr to retire from teaching and devote himself to publishing, writing and art (in which it should be noted he had no formal training).

In 1960 he began work on what he called A Northamptonshire Record. This series of paintings and sketches of houses, bridges, monuments, follies, and above all churches and church fittings would eventually be bound in 7 large volumes. Three garden ornaments illustrated by Carr are the Orangery at Barton Hall in Barton Seagrave, the Triangular Lodge at Rushton, and Bunkers Hill Farm on the Boughton Hall estate.

The works vary in quality from what Carr himself called a ‘quick and crude’ sketch, to much more finished works that are very good, and very much in the style of artists of the day such as John Piper and Kenneth Rowntree. Carr was a great admirer of Piper and one of his works is captioned ‘drawn while still inebriated by a visit to the Piper exhibition’ – strong words from a man who had been brought up in a Methodist household, where temperance was strictly upheld.

Carr was also a self-taught sculptor, and many of his pieces were on display in his garden. The relatively small town plot was laid out with paths winding between trees and shrubs, so that the visitor could never see far ahead, and statues suddenly appeared around corners. Sometimes the carvings (usually made from salvaged stone) had only a limited stay in the garden, and once they had developed a suitable patina Carr would place them in long grass in local churchyards for future church-crawlers to discover, saying ‘that’ll give ’em something to think about’.

J.L Carr died in 1994, and according to his wishes the seven volumes of A Northamptonshire Record were deposited in the Northamptonshire Archives. All of the works have been digitised, including his fine views of churches, and can be seen on the Visual Arts Data Service website. Make a coffee and have a good look https://vads.ac.uk/digital/collection/JLC/search

The Quince Tree Press continues under the direction of Carr’s family. Thanks to Bob Carr for permission to use these images from his father’s volumes of drawings http://www.quincetreepress.co.uk

For the background to this post The Folly Flâneuse is indebted to the biography of Carr by Byron Rogers The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr, Aurum Press (2003)

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A view of the house at Sledmere, painted in 1795, shows a classical orangery west of the kitchen garden. No trace of this building survives today but, mysteriously, another 18th century orangery can be found between the house and the stables.

Little is known about Sledmere’s first orangery. It must have been built in the late 18th century, and is believed to have been pulled down by Sir Tatton Sykes, 5th baronet (1826-1913) after he succeeded to the estate in 1863. Family legend has it that he was a great eccentric who thought flowers ‘nasty untidy things’ and wore countless layers of clothes. Local children would look out for his discarded coats and jackets, knowing that they would be rewarded with a coin when they returned them to the mansion. It is said that on a train journey, when swaddled in clothes, Sir Tatton became overheated. Rather than remove an outer garment he took off his shoes and socks and stuck his feet out of the window. Not a man to do things by halves, he also financed the building or restoration of  17 churches in the Yorkshire Wolds.

200 miles from Sledmere is Fairford Park, near Cirencester in Gloucestershire. The fine mansion was remodelled by Sir John Soane in the late 18th century, and the park was laid out by William Eames, a designer who created landscapes in the natural fashion made famous by Capability Brown. In 1787 it was said that ‘many alterations and improvements’ were ongoing in the park and gardens, and the new Orangery, with a roundel of Flora in the pediment, and four Coade stone plaques showing putti representing the four seasons, probably dates from this period.

In 1945 Fairford was bought by Ernest Cook, a former partner in the pioneering travel company Thomas Cook & Son. He had used his wealth to acquire 17 country estates, and his original plan was to donate them to the National Trust. At Fairford there were complications as land on the estate was still occupied by a Polish Displaced Persons camp, and until that was legally de-requisitioned the gift could not be made. Later, Cook’s relationship with the National Trust soured (the trust’s James Lee-Milne found the park at Fairford ‘flat and dull’ and decided the property was ‘unacceptable’). Only a handful of the properties were donated, with the others, including Fairford, placed in the Ernest Cook Trust, founded in 1952 and continuing today.

The house at Fairford was demolished in the mid-1950s to make way for a new secondary school, and the orangery, by now in a poor condition, was dismantled soon after and the facade given to the National Trust for safekeeping. For reasons unknown, the trust decided not to re-erect it in one of its many parks as originally planned, but instead gave it to the Sykes family of Sledmere on the condition that once rebuilt there would be public access. The Bath stone front, including the Coade stone ornaments, remained in storage for some years before Sir Tatton Sykes, 8th bart, commissioned the highly-regarded architectural practice Francis Johnson and Partners of Bridlington to restore and reuse the stonework as the front of a new orangery built of local brick. A plaque on the rear (private) elevation, which overlooks a swimming pool, records that it was completed in 2005.

The original design of the orangery is attributed to Sir John Soane, and dated c.1790, although no firm evidence has been found. The new interior was therefore modelled on the Music Room at Earsham in Norfolk, a Soane garden building of a similar date. New plasterwork was commissioned from the master craftsmen at Stevensons of Norwich, including medallions with the Sykes heraldic triton, seen on many buildings on the estate. The building was awarded a commendation for a ‘New Building in a Georgian Context’ by the Georgian Group in 2012.

For Sledmere see https://www.sledmerehouse.com

For the Sykes churches see https://www.eychurches.org.uk/images/stories/leaflets/Sykes_Open_Churches_Leaflet.pdf

The Ernest Cook Trust continues today as the U.K.’s foremost providers and funders of outdoor learning, helping children and young people, particularly those who are disadvantaged, develop a love and understanding of the natural world. Their offices are in the grounds of Fairford Park https://ernestcooktrust.org.uk

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