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Purpose
Signed and dated
- 1767
Notes
Kingsgate Castle (or Holland House), was built in c1762-68 by Henry Holland, on the cliffs above Kingsgate Bay, and to designs by the amateur architect, Thomas Wynn (created 1st Baron Newborough in 1776). Pevsner reports that the house was surrounded by 'a host of crazy follies, all built of flint', some of which survive. A single surviving design at Sir John Soane's Museum, for the ceiling of Lady Holland's bedroom, is evidence that Holland had approached Robert Adam for at least one interior decorative scheme in 1767. This was not executed.
Kingsgate was sold by Lord Holland's son, Charles James Fox, 2nd Lord Holland, and the house fell into ruin by the end of the eighteenth century. In 1807 Edward Gyfford (1773-1856) began planning a scheme to turn the estate into a seaside resort, but nothing came of this. Instead, it was rebuilt and enlarged by John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury (1834-1913). The remains of Lord Holland's house (now known as Old Holland House) is the nucleus of the surviving building, which was converted into flats in the early 1990s.
See also: Piccadilly, number 147
Literature:
A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 20, 75; N. Pevsner, and J. Newman, The buildings of England: north east and east Kent, 1983, p. 366; D. King, The complete works of Robert & James Adam and unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, p. 179; R.R. Sedgwick, 'Fox, Henry (1705-74), of Holland House, Kensington', History of Parliament online, 2012; 'Holland End House Little Holland House, Broadstairs and St Peters', and 'Kingsgate Castle, Broadstairs and St Peters', British listed buildings online, 2012
Frances Sands, 2012
Upated 2021.
I am grateful to Janice Dale, Rhug Estate Administrator, for information regarding Thomas Wynn. January 2021.
Level
Sir John Soane's collection includes some 30,000 architectural, design and topographical drawings which is a very important resource for scholars worldwide. His was the first architect’s collection to attempt to preserve the best in design for the architectural profession in the future, and it did so by assembling as exemplars surviving drawings by great Renaissance masters and by the leading architects in Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries and his near contemporaries such as Sir William Chambers, Robert Adam and George Dance the Younger. These drawings sit side by side with 9,000 drawings in Soane’s own hand or those of the pupils in his office, covering his early work as a student, his time in Italy and the drawings produced in the course of his architectural practice from 1780 until the 1830s.
Browse (via the vertical menu to the left) and search results for Drawings include a mixture of Concise catalogue records – drawn from an outline list of the collection – and fuller records where drawings have been catalogued in more detail (an ongoing process).