November 2008

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The story of the present building begins in 1640 (or thereabouts), when Sir Thomas Chicheley built a new house. Although its design and construction are barely documented, Adshead recovers its appearance from later survey drawings, and convincingly associates the astylar classicism of its façades with a group of East Anglian houses connected with the architect Peter Mills. Schemes were afoot to replace it in 1707, when Kip and Knyff included an ‘eleven-bay house … [that] can never have existed’ in their bird’s-eye view of the newly planted gardens. The inclusion of this unexecuted design gives credence to an early-19th-century reference – discovered by John Harris and cited by Adshead – to a parcel of lost designs for Wimpole by Sir Christopher Wren. The recent recovery of Wren’s involvement at Newby Hall in Yorkshire makes this less improbable than it might once have seemed. Did Kip and Knyff include unexecuted projects elsewhere in their supposedly topographical views?

Chicheley’s house survives at the core of the present building. The most significant overlays date from the beginning, middle, and end of the 18th century. During the ownership of Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford, Wimpole became a centre of Tory opposition, and James Gibbs was called in to extend the house, including accommodation for the vast Harleian Library. Harley sold the estate in 1739, and it was the Yorke Earls of Hardwicke who employed Henry Flitcroft to bring the exterior façades up to date, and who, a generation later, engaged Sir John Soane to remodel the interior. Adshead’s account of the famous Yellow Drawing Room brilliantly reveals the responsive nature of Soane’s creativity. His contribution to Wimpole extended far beyond the house, and drawings from his office occupy one quarter of the catalogue. The park and gardens are no less a palimpsest than the house, and Adshead describes the successive contributions of George London and Henry Wise (probably), Charles Bridgeman, ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton. Meanwhile, Sanderson Miller, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart and Soane furnished the landscape with garden buildings.

A liberal number of drawings are illustrated in black-and-white throughout the text, while 15 more are reproduced as colour plates. In addition to this, the book comes with a CD-ROM containing a complete set of illustrations. This combination of new and old media, Adshead writes in the preface, addresses ‘the perennial problems associated with comprehensive illustration – cost and space’, and provides ‘a hybrid … that offers at least some of the benefits of both conventional and on-line publication’.