Sundridge Park

www.historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list

An 18th century landscape park and pleasure grounds. Humphry Repton with John Nash advised the late 18th century owners on the siting of a new house and associated landscaping.

DESCRIPTION

LOCATION, AREA, BOUNDARIES, LANDFORM, SETTING

Sundridge Park is situated in suburban south-east London. Mottingham lies c 2.5km to the north, Chiselhurst c 1.5km to the east, and Bromley 2km to the south-west. The c 120ha site is bounded by New Street Hill to the north, and the railway line and ancient Elmstead Wood to the north-east. Sundridge Avenue provides the boundary to the south-east, while C20 residential development to the north of Orchard Road and Sundridge Avenue, along with school playing fields, provides the boundary to the south. Small residential roads, Garden Road and Lodge Road, make up the south-west boundary, with Hall's Farm providing the boundary to the west.

ENTRANCES AND APPROACHES

The mansion is approached from Plaistow Lane to the south-west where a C19 brick-built lodge guards the entrance to a tree-lined drive. The drive runs east-north-east for c 900m, curving through the parkland to arrive at the mansion and stables. Previously a public road known as Wood Lane (Rocque, 1746), it was by the late C18 'improperly' (according to Repton) known as the Avenue. Repton preferred to call it the Approach and upgraded it, giving it a lodge and a gate.

PRINCIPAL BUILDING

The mansion, Sundridge Park (listed grade I), stands on a shallow south-facing slope with Elmstead Wood rising behind. It is a large rambling mansion with three giant porticoes, white stucco, and a slate roof. The two-storey house expands towards the south with three bays at forty-five degrees to the entrance front. In the centre is a curved bay of three windows with six free-standing Corinthian columns and a wrought-iron balcony on the first floor. Above the cornice of the entabultar is a balustraded parapet and inset within this, an attic storey of three windows surmounted by a lead saucer dome. The east and west fronts are almost identical to each other with shallow flights of steps leading up from the garden through matching Corinthian porticoes. The main portion of the building was built for Claude Scott by John Nash after Humphry Repton advised the former owner Edward George Lind to re-site the mansion. Nash exhibited designs for the house in 1799 and Angus in his Seats of the Nobility and Gentry (1804) remarks that 'the form of the house was fixed and planned on the ground at the time when Mr Repton and Mr Nash mutually assisted each other'. The interiors however were largely completed by Samuel Wyatt who had replaced Nash as architect by the beginning of the C18 (Cherry and Pevsner 1994).

To the north-west of the mansion are the stables and the coach house (listed grade II*). Designed by Samuel Wyatt, the semicircular stable block encloses a yard. The three-storey central pedimented pavilion is topped with a cupola and, like the two pavilions at the east and west ends of the curving stable block, housed the carriages. The staff lived in rooms and apartments on the first floor.

GARDENS AND PLEASURE GROUNDS

The c 9ha pleasure grounds lie mainly to the south, east, and north of the mansion. To the south a gravel path leads east around the mansion to a grassed terrace decorated with herbaceous beds. The terrace, which extends south-east for c 50m, is divided into two, the slightly smaller area to the west being enclosed on four sides by gravel paths. To the south the terrace is supported by a C19 brick wall capped with stone beyond which an area of grass, planted with ornamental trees, slopes down for c 20m to where the remains of an C18 ha-ha separates the pleasure grounds from the park. The north-east side of the lawn is bordered by a c 1m high brick wall which supports a second, smaller, grassed terrace beyond which the wooded slopes of High Grove extend northwards. High Grove, an area of woodland to the north of the mansion, is first named on the 1st edition OS map of 1870. Humphry Repton's design for the pleasure grounds included a formal garden on the levelled plateau to the east of the mansion. The line of the stone-capped terrace wall however is not recorded until 1898 (OS 2nd edition). When the terrace garden was redesigned by Rosemary Verey in 1992 brick walls were removed, grass re-laid, and the herbaceous beds put in.

At the east end of the lower terrace an informal grass path leads east towards a rectangular strip of land, named since at least 1898 (OS) Botany Bay, before swinging north into High Grove. It is possible that it was in this area that at least one of the Pulhamite features made between 1873 and 1874 was located. Rocks were recorded in the area in 1992 (O'Connor, 1992) but were not apparent in 1999. To the north, on the boundary between High Grove and the northern parkland is a small pond surviving from at least the mid C19 (Tithe map, 1841) and from this point the parkland rises northwards to the boundary of the site with Elmstead Wood. Here, the section of the railway which runs along the northern boundary of the estate is set in a tunnel.

The path from High Grove continues west around the back of the stables to the late C20 buildings which house facilities for the training centre. Named after the founder of the management centre, Ernest Butten, the main building was built in 1970 on the site of the C19 conservatory. To the south of this building, the C19 stone steps provide access up to the C19 formal terraces which fronted the conservatory; these are now (1999) laid mainly to grass. To the south of the terraces a road leads south-west to join up with the entrance drive, south of the mansion.

PARK

The c 110ha park around the mansion is now made over to two golf courses: an eighteen-hole course and a nine-hole course. The first of these was laid out by John Randall and was formally opened in 1903 by the then Prime Minister, the Rt Hon A J Balfour. The Kyd Brook runs from south-east to north-west across the parkland to the south of the mansion. Humphry Repton converted an existing pond, made from damming the River Quaggy, to an ornamental lake (Wilson, nd), but by 1910 the lake had gone (OS). In the early 1990s proposals were drafted for the reinstatement of the lake, but it was decided that it would be more practical to reinstate the stream.

An early C19 brick-built icehouse (listed grade II) is situated in the parkland against the southern boundary, 700m south-west of the mansion. It is an an unusually large domed subterranean structure with a barrel-vaulted approach passage.

REFERENCES

H Repton, Red Book for Sundridge (1793) [held at the Sundridge Management Centre]

Angus, Seats of the Nobility and Gentry...(1787), pl 56

J Pulham & Sons, Picturesque Ferneries and Rock-Garden Scenery, in Water falls,Rocky Streams (etc), (publicity brochure 1877)

D Stroud, Humphry Repton (1962), pp 98, 105

G Carter et al, Humphry Repton (1982), p 156

B Cherry and N Pevsner, The Buildings of England: London 2 South (1994), pp 170-172

K Wilson, Sundridge Park Words and Drawings (Sundridge Park Management Centre, nd)

Maps

J Rocque, An exact Survey of Twenty Miles around London, surveyed 1741-1745, published 1746

Tithe map, 1841

Liam O'Connor, Sundridge Park, Kent, Walled Garden site plan, February 1992 [copy on EH file]

OS Surveyor's Drawing, 3" to 1 mile, 1798

OS 6" to 1 mile: 1st edition published 1870

2nd edition published 1898

3rd edition published 1910 1930 edition 1938 edition

OS 25" to 1 mile: 1st edition published 1870

Description written: December 1999

Edited: June 2001