Earsham Hall stands near Bungay in Suffolk, but is actually just over the county boundary and in Norfolk. In the later years of the eighteenth century it was home to William Windham and within the grounds stood this elegant classical pavilion, which terminated a vista. It was originally built as a greenhouse, but in 1784 the architect Sir John Soane was asked to convert the building, which had a front ‘enriched with columns, niches and other ornaments’, into a ‘music-room’.

Arriving at Earsham in August 1784, John Soane quickly sketched out the proposed alterations to the greenhouse. Windham (c.1706-1789) must have been happy with the new design as the masons were quickly instructed to start work. Soane made eight further visits to check on progress, before submitting his bill in 1786.

Soane published a section of the building in his Plans, Elevations and Sections of Buildings Erected in the Counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Warwickshire, Hertfordshire et caetera [sic] of 1778. Plate XLV shows the interior and the text gives a comprehensive picture of the Music Room when work was complete: ‘The ceiling is highly finished with stucco ornaments in compartments, as are also the circular ends; the walls are stuccoed and decorated with paintings in chiaros oscuro and other enrichments. The chimney-piece is of white marble, and the floor is paved; it being with the possessor to have the building as elegant as possible.’ The paintings are gone, and the fire surround removed, but the beautiful plasterwork and paved floor survive.

Frustratingly, Soane’s published description is ambiguous – he notes that the building was ‘intended for a greenhouse, and completed for that purpose’. Was the greenhouse also a Soane design, or is it the work of another architect? Soane did not publish an elevation of the building, although his bill to Windham notes that he made a drawing of the ‘outside’. Greater minds than the Flâneuse have failed to reach a conclusion, although all can agree that the building we see today is an absolute delight.

The estate was maintained into the early years of the twentieth century, with the gardens, then owned by Captain Meade, being opened for fetes and flower shows. Regular readers will know that the Flâneuse loves a diversion, so she was intrigued to discover that one of the ‘well-known floriculturalists’ who exhibited was Mr H. Rider Haggard, better known as the author of adventure stories. In the 1940s the estate was dispersed, with the house being sold to a school. Captain Meade retained ownership of the Music Room, which gradually disappeared inside an overgrown shrubbery.

In 1953 Ian Nairn, soon to become admired as a journalist and broadcaster, was an RAF officer stationed in Norfolk. During flights he looked out for anything of architectural interest: spotting the pavilion from the air, he returned to explore on foot. He shared his find with Dorothy Stroud, the ‘Inspectress’ of the Sir John Soane Museum in London, and she included the Music Room in her article on Soane’s early works published in the Architectural Review in 1957 (as Gillian Darley has noted, Miss Stroud did not acknowledge Nairn’s discovery). It was probably at the instigation of Nairn and/or Stroud that the National Buildings Record commissioned photos of Earsham in 1954, showing that the building was then being used as a rather elegant junkroom.

One of the Directing Editors of the Architectural Review was Nikolaus Pevsner. In 1959 he visited Earsham to see the Music Room and, having fought his way through the shrubbery to reach the building, he described it as ‘going to rack and ruin’. Concerned for the future of the building, he suggested it might find a new home at Portmeirion, the Welsh village where Clough Williams-Ellis was rehousing architectural waifs and strays. The elegant garden building was described by Pevsner as a ‘little gem’ and a ‘peach for Portmeirion’, but before any further action could be taken the building was listed at grade I in December 1959, ending any question of moving the structure.

The school closed in 1973 and a few years later Earsham Hall became home to the Derham family. The house is their home, and they run a number of businesses from the former stables and ancillary buildings.

The Music Room remained with the Meade family, and in the 1990s work began to convert it into a holiday let. Renovation was not fully complete when the buildings, adjacent workshops in various stages of conversion, together with the overgrown kitchen garden, were brought to the market by Savills. Happily the Derham family was the purchaser, and the properties have been reunited with the house, offices and pleasure grounds.

The house and gardens are private, but open for occasional tours. The courtyard is home to an antiques centre, shops and tearooms and you can glimpse the house as you drive in. Their is currently no public access to the Music Room, but the plan is for it to be available as a holiday rental in due course: the Flâneuse is grateful to the Derham family for permission to see this gorgeous garden ornament. You can read more about the businesses and special events at Earsham Hall here.

Williams-Ellis missed out on a second music pavilion. In 1957 it was suggested that the facade of the Music Room in Lancaster might find a home at Portmeirion. Happily, that too was saved to remain in situ, and it now houses a Landmark Trust apartment, with magnificent plasterwork in the principal room.

Thank you for reading. Your thoughts and comments are welcome, as is further information. Please scroll down to the comments box to get in touch.

North Seaton Hall stood in the hamlet of the same name, just inland from Newbiggin by the Sea on the Northumberland coast. The house and ancillary buildings were demolished in the 1960s, and the land developed for housing: only the road called ‘Summerhouse Lane’ gives a clue to a fascinating feature which once ornamented the grounds.

The hall, seat of the Watson family, was described as newly built in 1730. It is shown on Armstrong’s 1769 map of Northumberland, and alongside it stands what looks like a substantial tower or summerhouse. At that date the hall was home to Stephen and Dorothy Watson and their family. Little is known of the Summerhouse’s early history,  but it was probably used as a banqueting house and belvedere to take advantage of the views to the coast.

The Summerhouse may have had a less frivolous purpose at a time when Britain feared invasion by the French. Stephen and Dorothy’s son, William Watson (1751-1830), supervised the ‘Beacon man’ at Newbiggin. His role was to keep a lookout and be ready to light a warning beacon should the French fleet be spotted. In November 1796, with invasion thought imminent, Watson charged him to be ‘more than usually attentive and give immediate notice if anything extraordinary appears at Sea’. Watson’s summerhouse would probably have been equipped with a telescope so that he too could survey the North Sea: the building was known locally as ‘the Lookout’.

It is not known who designed the mansion or the quirky Summerhouse with its pretty gothic glazing in the windows (varying on each storey), pierced battlements and curved roof giving just a nod to chinoiserie. Local architect John Dobson has been suggested, and his daughter Mary wrote a memoir of her father in which she states that the first house he designed was at ‘North Seaton’ for J. Nicholson Esq. in 1813. Many texts repeat this attribution, but in 1813 North Seaton Hall was the established seat of the Watsons, so it would seem that Nicholson’s new house was elsewhere. Dobson may however have worked at North Seaton at a later date: the drawing featured here was part of a collection that included many of Dobson’s houses in Northumberland, and so it may record recent remodelling of the house and/or summerhouse. Sadly few records from Dobson’s practice survive to provide answers.

By the middle of the 19th century the house was described as an ‘elegant mansion […] surrounded by pleasing scenery’. The 25″ Ordnance Survey map, surveyed in 1896, shows the tower with its curious, charming, meandering external staircase, as also seen in old photographs. Although sometimes described as a ‘lodge’, this map makes it clear that it was a garden feature and did not, at that date, sit on the drive.

The Watsons left the estate in the middle of the 19th century, and there were then a number of owners and tenants. In 1930 the hall was converted into a Migration Training Hostel where young men were given tuition for work they might do overseas. Almost immediately the demand for emigrants dried up, so the hall was then used as a holiday centre before the contents were sold in 1933. Local newspaper Blyth News was saddened at this ‘chequered history’ and was at a loss to know ‘what will transpire next’.

The hall was converted into council apartments after the Second World War, but in 1953 the families were rehoused as the house was badly infested with woodworm. In that same year the decision was taken to demolish the grade II listed hall, although no immediate action was taken. At that date it was thought that the summerhouse  ‘could be retained as a historic building’, but with the house empty the thieves and vandals arrived. In 1954 the County Surveyor reported that the summerhouse was in a poor condition, and that the police were seeking the thieves who had stripped the roof of its lead. Despite it being a scheduled monument (grade II), it was decided that the summerhouse ‘should be demolished in the interests of health and safety’, and the stone retained for use ‘elsewhere’.

Nikolaus Pevsner visited around this date when researching for his Buildings of England volume on Northumberland, which would be published in 1957. His depressing summary was that the hall was ‘very neglected’ but he did note the summerhouse which described as ‘solid early 19C Gothic Revival’. In May 1961 the inevitable (for that period) demolition work began. It was thought too dangerous for the rotted interiors to be dismantled, so the structure was deliberately set on fire, with the local fire brigade tackling the blaze as a training exercise. The remains of the mansion were then pulled down, along with the Summerhouse, and the grounds developed for housing.

Today, the Summerhouse is remembered only in a street name.

Thanks to the team at Northumberland Archives for their help with this story.

Your thoughts are always welcome. Please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page to get in touch. Thank you for reading.

The arrival of an updated volume in the Buildings of England series is always a cause for celebration. Better known simply as ‘Pevsners’, after Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983), the author of the earliest volumes, the books are regularly revised. The latest volume to be painstakingly brought up to date covers the county of Wiltshire, and is the work of Julian Orbach. The first edition of the Wiltshire volume appeared in 1963, and was close to Pevsner’s heart, as he had a home in Clyffe Pypard where he and his family spent much of their time: his dedication calls Wiltshire ‘the county of the cottage’.

Pevsner was always keen to include the garden ornaments that embellished the landscapes of great houses in his volumes, and in Wiltshire there were plenty of outstanding parks: Bowood, Wardour, Fonthill and Wilton to name but a few. And of course Stourhead, which Pevsner ranked alongside Stowe as ‘the best place in England to enthuse in landscaped grounds and garden furnishings’ (a very Pevsnerian phrase). But it is in discussing a lesser known landscape ornament that Pevsner’s dry style is best illustrated. At Wick Hill, near Bremhill, stands the Maud Heath Monument. As the legend goes, Maud Heath was a ‘public-spirited old pedlar woman’ who became very wealthy. In 1474 she created a trust to fund the construction of a causeway from Wick Hill to Chippenham, and an endowment for its future maintenance.

Centuries later the 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne (1780-1863) of nearby Bowood House, and William Lisle Bowles (1762-1850), vicar of Bremhill, two of the Trustees of Maud Heath’s Charity, erected a column topped with a seated figure of Maud. Bowles composed the poem which features in the inscription:

Thou who dost pause on this aerial hight [sic]
Where MAUD HEATH’s Pathway winds in shade or light,
Christian Wayfarer in a world of strife
Be STILL and ponder on the Path of Life.

Bowles composed sonnets which were admired by the young Coleridge, but later in life, as his poems grew from 14 to over 2,000 lines (his publisher, John Murray, unsuccessfully suggested that his compositions might be condensed a little), his work fell out of favour.

Work began on the column in October 1837, and was completed the following year. A stone chair was erected at the same date, but broken by vandals soon after. The ‘handsome reward’ which was offered presumably led to information on the culprits, and as this drawing by Charles George Harper (1892-1933) shows the chair was restored and it remains in place today. The sculptor of the odd, but rather endearing, depiction of Maud and her basket of wares is not known, but occasional restoration work has kept her looking her best – including after she literally lost her head in a storm in 1990. Trees now obscure the full panorama, but Maud certainly enjoys an extensive prospect.

To return to Nikolaus Pevsner: he was no fan of the stanza or the sculptor, and his wonderful deadpan conclusion was that ‘The quality of the poetry matches that of the statue’.

Maud Heath has given her name to a vineyard close to her monument. It seemed only right that The Folly Flâneuse should toast Maud Heath and everyone who has contributed to a ‘Pevsner’ over the years.

The new Wiltshire volume contains follies and landscape ornaments that have been built in the years since Pevsner’s death in 1963 (he is buried with his wife in the churchyard at Clyffe Pypard). To pick just two: in the first years of the present century Sir Henry and Lady Keswick erected a stunning glass pyramid, to a design by I.M. Pei, at Oare House. Completely different in character is Colin’s Barn near Chedglow, a rustic, organic, labour of love built by Colin Stokes in the last decade of the 20th century, and recently listed by Historic England.

An early Pevsner would fit in your pocket. After updates by Bridget Cherry in 1975, and now Julian Orbach, a backpack might be in order, but it will be worth the effort. For more on the new Wiltshire volume, which is published on 8 June, see https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?k=9780300251203

There’s more on Maud Heath and her philanthropy here https://bremhillparishhistory.com/article/maud-heaths-causeway/

Oare House and Colin’s Barn are private. Maud Heath’s monument has full public access.

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