That noise you can hear is the endless rumble of traffic above your head. That's if you've the good fortune to be visiting Alexander Pope's recently and carefully restored grotto and tunnel. Sadly it's the last remaining part of his villa, which he built at the age of thirty-two in 1720, on the north bank of the Thames in Twickenham, and from which said tunnel connected to his groves, arbours and temples beneath a highway. Back then of course, any noise you may have heard above your head would most likely have been the galloping of horses hooves.
Pope's Villa
As for the title of this post it should make sense when placed in context a little later.
In the meantime, by 1719 Pope had enough money from his revered translation of Homer’s Iliad to lease a plot of land, undeterred by smelly neighbours including a tannery and a chicken seller. (He was about 130 years too early to be challenged by the waft of cabbage that saw off Tennyson - see Post 37). Pope, whose health was fragile, moved from London with his mother and childhood nurse, went on to build a "modest villa", and then launched the project that occupied the rest of his life, namely the grotto and gardens.
Pope selected crystals and shells as decoration, after which, having taken an interest in geology on a spa visit to Bristol ... started again. He filled his grotto with mineral specimens laid in correct geological layers, giving one of a number of puzzles to the restorers three hundred years later. He begged building materials and specimens from friends and contacts, including cartloads of stone from Ralph Allen, owner of the quarries that built Bath, no less. He acquired stalagmites from Wookey Hole in Somerset; and distinctive hexagonal slices from the Giant’s Causeway in Antrim in Northern Ireland, donated by physician and naturalist Sir Hans Sloane.
Inside
And Out
As a delighted Pope put it in 1725, on concluding work on his vision:
"I have put the last hand to my works… happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto: I then found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thru’ the Cavern day and night."
Pope saw it as perfection, thwarted only by an absence of nymphs. Rather begs the question then, why he didn't add them, considering the freedom of thought and scale evidently in play.
In any event the end result was, indeed, widely admired, including by Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Swift.
Guests would arrive by river, pass through this man-made cave sparkling with rare minerals and fossils, and then climb a gentle slope into his garden where they might pause on a bench for a moment to recite a few lines of classical poetry and contemplate a sip of crystal water from the stream.
His creation was so famous that his gardener, John Serle, produced a now invaluable illustrated guide a year after his death:
Mavis Batey, one of the leading female code breakers at Bletchley Park, who later became an author and gardening historian campaigning to save historic parks and gardens, describes it as ‘A seminal event in the 18th Century search to establish man’s relationship to nature’.
The house was demolished in 1807 by Lady Howe, sixty-three years after Pope's death. She had apparently wearied of literary pilgrims. Only the grotto-tunnel survived, and her cultural vandalism was pilloried by a neighbour who had recently purchased a couple of plots of land in the area, namely JMW Turner. His sketch of the half-demolished house was titled unambiguously 'Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, During its Dilapidation'. Though Pope was long-dead, the act against the memory of a poet so strongly associated with the Thames-side landscape, and one who had influenced his own literary efforts, was heavy for Turner to bear.
'Pope’s Villa at Twickenham, During its Dilapidation' by JMW Turner, 1807
Over the next two hundred years the site became the subject of much redevelopment. All we have left is the grotto and tunnel, which these days leads less salubriously from the red-brick cellars of one local school to the front yard of another. Pope's once sparkling stream, from which a visitor is said to have drunk from as late as 1842, is sadly no more - another restoration conundrum.
Talking of which, restoration of the grotto and tunnel at a cost of approximately £400,000, funded partly by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, was organised by the Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust. Work included filling gaps in walls left by collapses and selfish souvenir hunters over the years, after which Pope’s beguiling mixture of glitter and gloom - a mine of stones, shells, minerals and metals considered by some to be among the most significant buildings of the English Landscape Garden Movement - was recreated and has been accessible to the public for thirty weekends a year since 2023. Though the original river approach can only be recreated digitally, the folly is happily back and can be enjoyed by all.
I came across one Henry Labouchère who lived from 1881 to 1905 in a property built on the old site where Pope's villa had stood, (coming up in Post 56). Leaping forward over ninety years, in 1996 St James’s Independent School for Boys acquired the estate, remaining there for 14 years, during which time a Charitable Trust was created to preserve the grotto. The current owner, Radnor House School, arrived in 2010 and remains committed to the conservation project.
Site of Pope’s Villa
The dull blue / grey plaque above the door on the left makes reference to it. (The round blue plaque to the right is for the aforementioned Labouchère).
As for Alexander Pope, he was born on May 21st 1688 in London, and died aged 56 on May 30th 1744 in Twickenham. He was a poet and satirist of the English Augustan period, and best known for his poems An Essay on Criticism (1711), The Rape of the Lock (1712–14), The Dunciad (1728), and An Essay on Man (1733–34). He is noted as one of the most epigrammatic of all English authors.
Pope
According to The Oxford Dictionary of Quotation, he is second only to Shakespeare as the most quoted writer in the English language, some of his verses having become popular idioms in common parlance, e.g. damning with faint praise. He is also considered a master of the heroic couplet (what a splendid thing to be remembered for).
The Mawson’s Arms pub next to Fuller‘s Griffin Brewery in Chiswick
is home to a blue plaque remembering the poet
Pope's Twickenham Villa, showing the grotto, from a watercolour
produced soon after his death (artist unknown)
Nearby hotel / pub that until fairly recently was called The Pope’s Grotto
March 2024 update: The grotto can be visited by members of the public at occasional openings throughout the year, and on Open House London in September each year, or by special arrangement. Dates and booking procedures for visits are available on the LBRuT (London Borough of Richmond upon Thames) website.
Red arrow: Site of Pope’s Grotto, and long lost villa
Black arrow: The Mawson's Arms pub in Chiswick
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