The London entrance was the most important of the two entrances to Stratton Park, the other being on the Winchester road. From the start Dance visualised a pair of lodges with screen walls and an arched entrance and, despite his Neo-Classical designs for Stratton, these were initially roughed out in robust variants of a Castle style and then in a Tudor style. However, the final design was soon resolved though economics (or Baring's lack of pretension) meant that the screen wall was reduced in length. The single-storey lodges with two rooms each are rectangular on plan and project for most of their length towards the road, the gabled ends framed by plain shallow pilasters and a pediment. The screen wall merges in two quadrant curves with the inside return wall of the lodges and is almost the same height, so that the plain, understated solidity of lodges and walls contrasts with the wide tall opening of the semicircular-headed entrance arch with its Indian-influenced proportions and ornament which were drawn and re-drawn by Dance with many adjustments and variations.

Before Sir Francis Baring bought the Stratton estate in 1801 he had been a director and then chairman of the East India Company and part of his fortune must have derived from his Indian interests. Whether Dance had this connection in mind when he designed the gate cannot be known.

With its twin lodges, the gate is now squeezed between a motorway (the M3) and a road (the A33). The front survives unchanged except that the domed cap and finials to the gate piers that Dance took so much trouble over have gone. The loggias at the back have been glazed in.

For a discussion of Dance's use of Indian elements - in which the gateway is a key example - see the note on the Guildhall, London.

Group

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