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Cuffnells near Lyndhurst, Hampshire: (not as executed) design for alterations and additions for George Rose, 1794 (3)

Described as 'a self-made placeman' George Rose (1744- 1818) was a Member of Parliament from 1744 to 1818. (See www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790-1820/ member/rose-george-1744-1818.) He was against the abolition of the slave trade, doubtless as he was also a plantation owner and agent to Dominica in 1784-1805. With his brother-in-law Samuel Duer and his sister-in-law Henrietta Duer, he bought in 1773 two plantations on Dominica together with the enslaved people on them. Rose settled his Dominican estates on his son George Henry Rose (1771-1855) in 1796.

Soane's additions to Cuffnells consisted mostly of a semicircular porch, a library (36 by 23 feet), an anti-library and a conservatory as well as bedrooms and dressing rooms on the first floor for which variant designs were given. The 'lawn' or garden front to the south-east was given round-arched first floor windows while those on the ground floor were rectangular and set in arched recess surrounds; the conservatory continued the round-arched theme. An engraved plate in The Beauties of England and Wales, 1805 and also an undated photocopy of a mid-20th century perspective of the garden front (SM information file) suggest that all of the windows became square-headed and without arched recesses and that the portico was omitted. The balconies to the upper windows became a continuous verandah and underneath each window was a rectangular plaque. A conservatory was built without arched openings but with larger, tripartite, doors at each end. Dorothy Stroud (Soane Museum Inspectress) visited Cuffnells in 1948 and her card index shows, for example, that the walls were clad with white mathematical tiles and the plaques were of Coade stone. The house was demolished in 1957.

Literature. P.Dean, Sir John Soane and the country estate , 1999, p.186; Legacies of British Slavery database, UCL: www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs

Jill Lever, November 2012
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