Aware that one way I’m trying to stay sane during these strange times is by gluing daily cycle rides together through gathering and sharing the odd nugget of historical interest in the area of south-west London where I live, my wife mentioned to me one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history lived for a while in a house on Hampton Court Green. Evidently a bit of a smarty pants, he was an accomplished mathematician, physicist, anatomist, astronomer and geometer too.
Sir Christopher Wren, (1632-1723), lived here, in The Old Court House, for fifteen years from 1708 aged 76, until his death in 1723 at 91. He was given a 50-year lease on the property by Queen Anne in lieu of overdue payments for his work on St. Paul’s Cathedral, for which he was paid on a time basis. (Apparently the authorities thought to be paid more he deliberately dragged his feet).
The house dates back to 1536, and was given a complete overhaul by Wren prior to moving in because he was disgusted by its decaying condition
It was, and is, the only house on Hampton Court Green, other than Hampton Court itself, to have a garden stretching to the River Thames. In Wren's day his most important visitors – normally royalty – would arrive by river, walk across the garden then climb a flight of stone steps to enter his house via the back door. The garden, accordingly, was as magnificent as the house.
Round the back
Going back a bit before Wren’s tenure, in 1666 the Great Fire destroyed two-thirds of the city of London. Wren, 34 years of age ash the time, submitted plans for rebuilding the city to King Charles II, but they were never adopted. However, with his appointment as the King's Surveyor of Works in 1669, he did have a presence in the general process of rebuilding the city, although he was not directly involved with the rebuilding of houses or companies' halls. But Wren was personally responsible for the rebuilding of 51 churches, though not every one of them represented his own fully developed design.
Wren's career was now well established, and it may have been his aforementioned 1669 appointment that persuaded him he could afford to take a wife. In fact he married twice within nine years, having two children with each wife. His first wife died from smallpox after only six years of marriage; the second of tuberculosis after less than three.
Wren was knighted in 1673 after making his mark as an architect, both in services to the Crown and in playing an important part in rebuilding London after the Great Fire.
Wren's later life was not without criticisms and attacks on his competence and taste. He had been living in The Old Court House for about four years when, in 1712, a Letter Concerning Design by Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury, proposed a new British style of architecture in which he censured Wren's cathedral, his taste and his long-standing control of royal works. In 1718, after holding the post of King's Surveyor of Works for nearly 50 years, and on the pretext of failing powers, Wren was dismissed in favour of William Benson, and effectively retired at the ripe old age of 86.
According to a 19th Century legend, Wren would often go to London to pay unofficial visits to St Paul's, to check on the progress of "my greatest work". On one of these trips, at the age of ninety, he caught a chill. Staying nearby at his house in St James's Street his condition worsened. A few days later on February 25th 1723 a servant who tried to wake him from his nap found that he had died. He was carried from there to St Paul's Cathedral for burial.
The Old Court House in Hampton changed hands a number of times after Wren’s death. Leaping forwards about two hundred years to the end of WWI until 1921, it was temporarily the site of the Hampton Court Auxiliary Hospital, which had been started by the British Red Cross and the Order of St. John to nurse wounded soldiers. This has faint echoes of the way Turner’s lodge was repurposed during wartime, when in WWII it served temporarily as a small factory producing airmen's uniforms.
Over forty years later in 1966 the house was sold, reputedly for a suitcase full of banknotes, to Julian Reynolds. He sold the remaining 89-year lease in 1968 to Toby Jessel, who at the time was one of the two Greater London Council members for the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, in which Hampton Court Palace and The Old Court House are both situated. Jessel was elected MP for Twickenham in 1970 and served for 27 years until 1997. In 1980 he married the actress and singer Eira Heath and owned The Old Court House for over 45 years, during which he entertained many people from the political establishment, including Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister of the UK.
I’ve been unable to track down who currently lives there, but as at 2013 it was on the market for £4.25m. A snip.
Red arrow: The Old Court House
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