Pitzhanger Manor: Sir John Soane's Country House in Ealing
Updated: 9 hours ago
Most of what Sir John Soane built has been demolished, altered or bombed. Pitzhanger is the exception: a house he chose, designed, built and lived in, still standing at the edge of a public park in Ealing. He meant it to found a dynasty of architects. It lasted him ten years.
Who Was Sir John Soane?
A bricklayer's fourth son, born in 1753, who got into the Royal Academy Schools on the strength of his drawing and his father's contacts in the trade. He won the Academy's Gold Medal for architecture in December 1776 and its travelling scholarship a year later, left for Italy in March 1778 and did not come back until June 1780. Rome, Paestum and Pompeii settled what kind of architect he was going to be.
What he did with it was strange and personal: top-lit rooms, shallow domes, mouldings pared back until they read as lines rather than ornament. He was Architect and Surveyor to the Bank of England for forty-five years, from 1788 to 1833. Built Dulwich Picture Gallery, became Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in 1806, and turned his own house at Lincoln's Inn Fields into a museum. Pitzhanger is where he tried the ideas out first.
Why Did Soane Build Pitzhanger Manor?
He bought the estate on 1 August 1800 for £4,500, when Ealing was still countryside and he was prosperous enough to want a country house. But this was not a retreat. It was three things at once: a showroom for clients, a setting for the collection of antiquities he was already amassing, and — above all — a schoolroom. Soane wanted his two sons to become architects, and he built them a house to grow up inside that would teach them how.
"I wished to make Pitzhanger Manor-house as complete as possible for the future residence of the young Architect." — Sir John Soane, 1835
What Did Soane Keep of the Old House?
One wing, and for a sentimental reason. The two-storey south wing had been designed by George Dance the Younger, in whose office the young Soane had worked on it as an assistant. He pulled down everything else and rebuilt from scratch between 1800 and 1804. So the building you walk round contains, at one end, the first thing he ever helped build, and at the other, the house he built to prove what he had become.
Why Does the Front Look Like a Triumphal Arch?
Because it is meant to. Soane took the two-storey proportions of the Arch of Constantine in Rome — a tall lower order, a compressed attic above — and applied them to a house in Middlesex. Four free-standing Ionic columns in Portland stone, carved roundels, eagles with laurel wreaths, statues along the top. It is a country villa wearing the clothes of imperial Rome, which for a bricklayer's son with a Gold Medal was the whole point.
Why Did Soane Sell Pitzhanger After Ten Years?
The plan failed on both fronts. His wife Eliza disliked living in the country. And neither son would have it: John was ill and idle, George had a temper, ran up debts, married against his father's wishes and eventually published an anonymous attack on Soane's architecture in a newspaper. Neither ever trained as an architect. Soane sold the house in 1810 and moved the collection back to Lincoln's Inn Fields — Hogarth's A Rake's Progress among it.
What he did instead was turn that house into a museum and a teaching collection for other people's sons. The dynasty never happened; the school did.
What Should You Look For Inside?
Light, mostly. The staircase starts in a gloomy basement and climbs into a glazed lantern, so the building gets brighter as you go up. The Breakfast Room has a shallow dome painted like sky. Ceilings elsewhere are pale green and white, cut with Greek key and anthemion, kept deliberately flat so they read as drawing rather than plasterwork. Almost everything is an experiment he would later use somewhere that mattered more.
What Is the Chinese Wallpaper in the Drawing Room?
The drawing room is the room people photograph, and the reason is the wallpaper: hand-painted birds and flowering branches, restored by hand, under a pastel ceiling. Chinese wallpaper became fashionable in eighteenth-century English houses on the back of imported lacquer, porcelain and silk carrying the same bird-and-flower motifs. Where they had long been used to express wishes and aspirations rather than simply to decorate.
What's in the Garden?
Soane's colonnade, for one. Its exposed timber roof and plain columns are a deliberate nod to the "primitive hut" — the imagined first shelter that eighteenth-century theorists argued the Greek orders had evolved from. It was demolished in Victorian times and rebuilt in the recent restoration, and it now links the Manor to the Gallery. Beyond it are the walled kitchen garden, a brick wall with an iron gate straight out into Walpole Park, and a wisteria pergola that is worth timing a visit for.
Is Pitzhanger Manor Open to the Public?
Yes. It reopened on 16 March 2019 after a three-year conservation project. Now opens Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm, with last admission an hour before closing and later opening on the first Thursday of the month. The Manor is ticketed and the Gallery next door shows contemporary art — Anish Kapoor came to talk here in June 2019 — so check what is on before you book. Concessions and free admission schemes are listed on the Pitzhanger website.
How Do You Get to Pitzhanger Manor?
Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, Ealing Green, London W5 5EQ. The nearest Underground station is Ealing Broadway, on the District, Central and Elizabeth lines, about eight minutes' walk. Walpole Park starts at the back gate and costs nothing.
What Else Is Worth Seeing Nearby?
Walpole Park is on the doorstep, Lammas Park is a kilometre away and Gunnersbury Park about two. All three turn well in October, and they are in my guide to the best autumn foliage in London. Four stops down the Piccadilly line, Boston Manor House is a Jacobean survivor with one of the best plaster ceilings in London, and it is free. And if you want to get inside west London buildings that normally stay shut, Open House comes round every September.
Supporting Pitzhanger
Pitzhanger is run as an independent charity, and its exhibitions and learning programme depend on donations as much as on ticket sales. If you have enjoyed a visit, the banner below goes to their donation page.
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