A Vanished Mansion

I have lived in London for almost half a century. I went to Gunnersbury Park for the first time, with Bertie, on a sunny day last month.

”The park lies between Brentford and Ealing. The vanished mansion built c. 1658-63 for Sir John Maynard by John Webb lay between the two present houses. It was one of the very few 17th century examples of a compact Palladian villa with a pedimented first floor loggia, a design reminiscent of Jones’s Prince’s Lodging at Newmarket. From 1762 to 1786 it was the summer residence of Princess Amelia, George III’s aunt, who improved the grounds and added many ornamental garden buildings. When the house was demolished in 1800 and the estate sold for building, most of the land was bought by Alexander Copland, a partner in Henry Holland’s building firm. By 1802 he had built for himself, probably to his own design, a house (now part of the Large Mansion) which was bought in 1835 by Nathan Mayer Rothschild and subsequently remodelled and extended for him by Sydney Smirke. The smaller house to the east, the Small Mansion, was completed by 1805 on a separate building plot and occupied from 1807 to 1828 by Major Alexander Morison, a retired East India Company officer, and from 1882 to 1889 by the Farmer family, for whom additions were made … In 1889 the house was sold to the Rothschilds, who used it for their guests. After 1917 the estate was split up; the houses and 186 acres were acquired by the local authorities and the grounds were opened as a public park in 1926.” (The Buildings of England, London 3: North West, Bridget Cherry and Nikolaus Pevsner, 1991)

Here’s what I didn’t see.

Here’s some of what I saw.