Wimbledon Manor House: A Succession of Historic Residences in London
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
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- Country
- United Kingdom
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- British, English
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Manor House
On this page18 sections
History
Wimbledon Manor House was a succession of residences in the United Kingdom, in London, developed by successive owners of the Wimbledon manor from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. Wimbledon manor emerged as a separate estate around 1328, after previously forming part of the manor of Mortlake. Its history reflects changes in church ownership, Tudor royal government, aristocratic patronage, landscape design, and suburban development.
Medieval manor and Tudor Crown ownership
In 1364, Simon Islip, Archbishop of Canterbury, granted the manor’s demesne lands, meaning the land retained for the lord’s own use, to Merton Priory. Wimbledon was among the church possessions forfeited by Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1397. After Henry IV came to the throne, Arundel was restored, and the archbishops continued to hold Wimbledon until the religious changes of the sixteenth century.
In 1536, during the Reformation and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Thomas Cranmer transferred the manor and its advowson to Henry VIII. An advowson was the legal right to nominate a parish’s incumbent. Henry granted Wimbledon to Thomas Cromwell, but the Crown recovered it after Cromwell’s death in 1540 and attached it to Hampton Court. Henry gave the manor to Catherine Parr in 1543. Following her death in 1548, it returned to the Crown.
The first known manor house was the Old Rectory, originally the church’s Parsonage House beside St Mary’s Church. After its compulsory transfer from ecclesiastical ownership in 1536, it passed through Cromwell and Henry VIII to Catherine Parr. Henry stayed there for three days in December 1546 when illness prevented him from continuing to Whitehall. In 1550, the Crown made the Old Rectory a grace-and-favour residence, a house granted for the use of someone connected with the royal household or government, for William Cecil, 1st Baron Burghley.
Queen Mary granted Wimbledon to Cardinal Reginald Pole in 1556 as part of the Counter-Reformation, the effort to restore Catholic influence after the Protestant changes of the Reformation. Queen Elizabeth I recovered the manor and granted it to Sir Christopher Hatton in 1576. Hatton sold it later that year to Sir Thomas Cecil, William Cecil’s son. Cecil had lived at the Old Rectory as a child, but he soon planned a much larger residence beside it.
Wimbledon Palace under the Cecils
Completed in 1588, Sir Thomas Cecil’s new house became known as Wimbledon Palace. It was a leading Elizabethan prodigy house, a highly ambitious country residence built to display status during Elizabeth I’s reign. The Cecils entertained the queen at Wimbledon for three days in 1599. The building was damaged in 1628 when stored gunpowder accidentally ignited.
Edward Cecil, Sir Thomas’s son, was later created 1st Viscount Wimbledon in connection with the estate. After Edward died in 1638, his heirs sold the manor and house to trustees acting for Queen Henrietta Maria. Alterations and enlargement followed in 1640 and 1641 under Inigo Jones, the Surveyor of the King’s Works, with Nicholas Stone working at the site.
The Civil War overturned the monarchy and led to the sale of Crown lands in 1649. Wimbledon passed to the Cromwellian general John Lambert. Lambert’s cultivation of tulips and other flowers helped establish the estate’s later association with flower gardening. After the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Wimbledon was returned to Henrietta Maria, who sold it in 1661 to trustees for John Digby, 1st Earl of Bristol. Bristol’s widow later sold the manor to Thomas Osborne, 1st Earl of Danby and later Duke of Leeds.
Eighteenth-century rebuilding
The Duke of Leeds’s heirs sold the manor in 1717 to Sir Theodore Janssen, 1st Baronet of Wimbledon, a founding director of both the Bank of England and the South Sea Company. Parliament stripped Janssen of the manor in 1721 after the South Sea Bubble, a major financial scandal whose collapse led to parliamentary investigations into company directors and others. Janssen appears to have retained the separate house he had commissioned.
Janssen commissioned a new residence in 1720 under the supervision of Colen Campbell and another overseer. It was built partly with brick salvaged from the Elizabethan manor house. The house and about 70 acres were sold to Martha Rush in 1749. Her son Samuel inherited them in 1759, and the estate passed to Sir William Beaumaris Rush in 1783.
Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, purchased the manor in 1723 for £15,000. She demolished the remaining fabric of the Cecil manor house and commissioned a new residence, completed in 1733. Its design was associated with Henry Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, and his assistant Roger Morris, while Francis Smith of Warwick is also recorded as its surveyor. The compact Palladian house, based on classical principles associated with Andrea Palladio, stood near the junction of what are now Arthur Road and Home Park Road.
Through the duchess, Wimbledon passed in 1744 to her ten-year-old heir, John, 1st Viscount Spencer, later 1st Earl Spencer. Under a contract made in 1764, Lancelot “Capability” Brown improved the park, including its lake, completing the work by 1768. The Palladian house burned down at Easter 1785 after fire spread from the laundry room. Lord Spencer cleared and levelled the ruins, leaving little visible evidence apart from a tunnel linking the principal house with separate staff quarters.
Regency house and nineteenth-century change
George John Spencer, 2nd Earl Spencer, rebuilt the residence between 1799 and 1802, probably to designs by Henry Holland. The new building was in the Regency style, which developed in Britain around the period of the Prince Regent, and incorporated the surviving staff quarters. It became known as Wimbledon Park House.
Edward St Maur, 11th Duke of Somerset, rented the house from 1827. He entertained Queen Victoria there in 1838. Joseph Paxton, later known as a gardener, architect, and designer associated with the Crystal Palace, had earlier worked at Wimbledon as a garden-boy under his brother, the head gardener. He returned in the 1840s to design formal gardens for the duke.
In 1846, the Spencer family sold Wimbledon Park House and the estate to John Augustus Beaumont for £85,000, while retaining the manorial title. From the 1860s, Beaumont reduced the park through speculative suburban development, leaving the house increasingly isolated and eventually dilapidated. The former house was demolished around 1949. Its sites later became the location of Park House Middle School, built in 1972 and demolished in the early 2000s. The land now forms part of the sports fields of Ricards Lodge High School.
Manor, common, and surviving historic fabric
The manorial lands contracted progressively from the eighteenth century. The approximately 300-acre Old Park was sold in 1705, while much of present-day Wimbledon Common had formerly belonged to the manor. In 1864, John Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, sought parliamentary permission to enclose Wimbledon Common, create a new park and house, and sell land for building. An inquiry rejected the proposal. A Board of Conservators established in 1871 received the common to preserve it in its natural condition, while tenant grazing rights continued.
Wimbledon Park remains a Grade II* protected historic park, and the Old Rectory is Grade II* listed. The Old Rectory was sold in 1947, and Russell Brock, later Baron Brock of Wimbledon, bought it in 1953. After the Brock family sold it in 1978, its kitchen garden was developed as housing known as Rectory Orchard. Basil Faidhi later carried out extensive restoration with assistance from English Heritage, while later work was undertaken with the assistance of Sir Donald Insall. In 1996, Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, sold his remaining interest in the lordship of Wimbledon to a Brazilian buyer. A manorial title could survive the sale of the estate without conveying ordinary ownership or governmental power.
Remains
The Old Rectory
Early house and later alterations
The Old Rectory adjoins the grounds of St Mary’s Church and was originally surrounded by a moat. The two-storey building was commissioned by the church in the early sixteenth century. Its plan included a large dining hall, withdrawing chamber, parlour, small chamber, extensive service quarters, a spiral staircase, ten first-floor chambers, five closets, and five roof garrets.
By 1720, the building was known as the Old Laundry House, probably because the Cecil manor house had been built beside it. When Janssen acquired the manor in 1717, the Old Rectory was uninhabited. He allegedly demolished its south wing and restored the remainder. By 1861, it was close to ruin. John Beaumont repaired its exterior, transformed and extended the interior, laid out the grounds, and planted the fig walk.
Nineteenth- and twentieth-century interiors
Samuel Willson added a two-storey drawing-room wing, carved-oak doors, and chimney pieces in English, Flemish, and Italian styles. In 1909, Matthias Jacobs enlarged the house with a single-storey billiard room, a large northern service wing, and a study extension that concealed the chapel. Thomas Lethaby later installed oak panelling from Chantry House in Newark, an elaborate plaster ceiling based on one at Knole House, and a grand fireplace.
The Old Rectory occupies approximately 2.5 acres. During Basil Faidhi’s restoration, its later interiors included a basement discotheque and bar. The building’s surviving form therefore combines the early parsonage with substantial alterations and additions from later owners.
Elizabethan Wimbledon Palace
Hilltop plan and terraces
Wimbledon Palace occupied a hilltop near the village, astride the upper part of what is now Home Park Road. It overlooked Wimbledon Park to the north and stood above a steep slope terraced with massive retaining walls. The house had a modified H plan, with a slightly recessed central range facing south. On the north side, a central entrance lay between deep flanking wings, with matching staircase towers at the inner corners. An asymmetrical service wing stood to the west.
The entrance court was a deep gated terrace entered from the sides, 26 steps below the upper formal entrance court. A monumental staircase with paired helical flights rose from a central landing between the two levels. The arrangement of the terraced hilltop was described as apparently inspired by the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. A 1649 survey recorded lower and upper courts joined by five ascents totalling 70 steps, together with freestone steps, iron and brick gates, and a paved court.
Interiors and service spaces
The Elizabethan house contained two galleries, including a richly painted and marbleized long gallery probably decorated by Francis Cleyn. The exterior was painted in camaieu, a nearly monochrome decorative technique, using yellow and burnt-ochre tones. The survey also recorded a brick-arched vault with small rooms used for bottled-wine storage, a fountain with a lead cistern, and a gallery paved with square stone.
Inigo Jones remodelled the old east wing for Henrietta Maria. The work added a chapel and marble parlour beside a terrace overlooking the orange garden. The house also contained a west stone gallery with an alcove for the queen’s bed, a large attic for drying clothes, panelled interiors, gilded-star decoration, and a long-gallery floor made from fragrant cedar.
Gardens and approach
André Mollet created a symmetrical garden arrangement on the south front for Henrietta Maria. An older sunken garden to the east became an orange garden with parterres, formal beds laid out in ornamental patterns, and an orangery for cultivating citrus trees. A service room was used for planting orange and pomegranate trees in boxes.
An inventory from 1649 listed about 1,000 fruit trees, including three large fig trees covering much of the house’s south wall. The orangery contained 42 orange trees in boxes, 18 young orange trees, a lemon tree bearing large lemons, a pomecitron tree, six pomegranate trees, a bay tree, and an Irish arbutus, an evergreen commonly known as the strawberry tree. Around 1609, the grounds covered approximately twelve acres divided into eleven spaces of plantations, walks, and parterres. A straight, tree-lined approach extended northward through the park towards Putney Common for 231 perches. The former approach can still be traced by the present tree line.
Janssen’s Belvedere House
Janssen’s 1720 house stood on a new site southwest of St Mary’s Church. Designed by Colen Campbell, it was partly constructed from brick taken from the Elizabethan manor house. The design remained incomplete when Janssen lived nearby in 1741. The façade was later altered, and an additional storey was added in 1782. Known subsequently as Belvedere House, it stood behind the gardens of present-day Alan Road and was demolished in 1900 for the Belvedere Estate housing development.
The Palladian and Regency houses
Duchess of Marlborough’s house
The Duchess of Marlborough’s house stood close to the junction of present-day Arthur Road and Home Park Road, immediately behind the former Cecil house, within the grounds of the current Ricards Lodge school. It was a compact Palladian building of grey brick with Portland-stone dressings. The seven-bay façade had slightly projecting end bays and a central three-bay pediment above a lightly projecting Ionic portico of four attached columns.
The building had a sunken ground floor, allowing the duchess, who suffered from gout, to enter at first-floor level without climbing steps. Its landscape design may have involved Charles Bridgeman, although the extent of his contribution is uncertain.
Wimbledon Park House and the wider park
The Regency Wimbledon Park House was built very close to the site of the Marlborough house between 1799 and 1802. It incorporated the surviving staff quarters and was eventually demolished around 1949. The former manor park extended to approximately 1,200 acres in the eighteenth century. It included the lake and other improvements made by “Capability” Brown, while later subdivisions reduced the estate.
Surviving public Wimbledon Park includes the lake and a golf course, while 42 acres of former manor parkland are occupied by the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Wimbledon Common, once partly within the manor, retained tenant grazing rights and was preserved from enclosure and development after the conservation settlement of 1871.
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