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Notes
This Adam scheme for Charlton is for a small site approximately 58ft by 39ft. The design is for a plain brick, five-bay house on a sloping site, with two-and-a-half storeys in the principal façade and three storeys to the rear. King suggests the scheme was intended for a site to the north-east of the manor house where a smaller house was constructed in c1762, close to the road now known as Cox Mount.
The client, John Jones Esq. of Ireland and Twickenham was the second husband of Margaretta / Margaret Maria Weller, whom he married in 1761. Margaret had inherited the estates and manor house of Charlton from her uncle, John Maryon. Mayron, rector of White Roding, Essex died in November 1760 without surviving issue and left the manor to Margaret, the daughter of his sister Mary and her husband William Peers. On her death, on 19 June 1777 at the age of 64, a monumental inscription was dedicated to Margaretta Maria Jones, set up in St Luke’s Church, Woolwich by her only child Jane Wilson.
Although the Adam drawings for Charlton are undated, King suggests a date of 1762, a year after John Jones’s marriage to Margaret. It also predates the 1766 Act of Parliament issued to the couple to enable them to establish a long lease of the estate to the Perceval family.
The house constructed in the 1760s to the north east of the manor was demolished in the nineteenth century. As a result we cannot know if Adam’s scheme was carried out.
Literature:
D. Lysons, ‘Charlton’, The environs of London: Volume 4, Counties of Herts, Essex and Kent, 1796, pp. 324-342; A.T. Bolton, The architecture of Robert and James Adam, 1922, Volume II, Index pp. 6, 77; D. King, The complete works of Robert and James Adam & Unbuilt Adam, 2001, Volume II, pp. 80, 124; ‘History of House and Gardens’, www.greenwichheritage.org; ‘Charlton near Woolwich: Monumental inscriptions of St Luke’s Church near Woolwich’, www.kentarchaeology.org.uk/research/monumental-inscriptions/charlton-near-blackheath (accessed February 2021)
Anna McAlaney, 2021
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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).