Number 22 Mansfield Street (previously number 5) is on the east side of the street, at the northern end, and was one of the two houses retained by Robert and James Adam.

In 1774 the lease was purchased by Sir Edward Dering, 5th Baronet (1732-98), who paid an estimated rent of £340 in that year, and he retained the house until 1783. Sir Edward had succeeded his father in 1762, taking possession of Surrenden Dering, Kent, for which he commissioned Robert Adam to design an unexecuted greenhouse at an unknown date. Sir Edward served as MP (Tory) for New Romney in 1761-70, and 1774-78, having inherited estates in the area through his first wife, Selina Furness, the daughter of Sir Robert Furness, 2nd Baronet, of Waldershare, Kent, whom he married in 1755 (she died in 1757). He married again in 1765, Deborah Winchester, the daughter of a surgeon.

Number 22 is one of the surviving houses, although an entrance on New Cavendish Street was made in the early twentieth century, and both drawing rooms contain twentieth-century Adam-revival ceilings. There is surviving Adam ornamentation within the stairwell, and there are eighteenth-century ceilings in the ante room and hall for which no drawings survive, but which are probably by Adam.

All of the houses on the east side of the street were purchased after the Second World War by the British Employers Confederation, and remained their headquarters until 1997. In 1998 a 150-year lease was acquired for all four buildings from the Howard de Walden estate by a developer who separated the houses, and sold the leases individually. Number 22 is now divided into four flats, one of which is the headquarters of the Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust.

See also: Surrenden Dering, Kent

Literature:
See Mansfield Street scheme notes.

Frances Sands, 2013

Sub-scheme

Digitisation of the Drawings Collection has been made possible through the generosity of the Leon Levy Foundation

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