Leith Hill Place must be one of the most overlooked properties in the National Trust’s Surrey stable. Nestled at the bottom of the ever popular Leith Hill, it is nevertheless little visited. Known mostly as the family home of the composer and musician Ralph Vaughan Williams, it also has associations with the Wedgewood family and Charles Darwin.
However, it is its architectural form and history that most intrigues oldgreytravel. The house is a relatively small country house and like many in this area started out as a timber-framed medieval manor. The transformation of the house into the starkly beautiful, finely proportioned edifice that we see today dates from around 1730. The owner, then, was a Colonel John Folliot, a career soldier who was to rise to the rank of lieutenant general. The house then passed through many hands before the Wedgewood/Williams family took possession in 1847 and remained owners until 1944, when it was handed over to the National Trust. It was the Wedgewood’s who added the cementitious render that now disfigures the exterior and is leading to problems of damp penetration and rot. There are plans to replace this with a breathable and historically more correct lime render.
The design is very unusual for its date. It is a strictly pared back version of Palladio’s early architectural style, devoid of the columns and decorative flourishes of his later style that became so typical of England’s neo classical country houses of the C18. The building looks as though it would be much happier in the marshy Veneto than sitting astride a hill in the south of England. The genesis of the house is something of a mystery. There is no record of who designed this accomplished, but flawed design. The strictly Palladian proportions and restrained detail indicate a learned and skilled hand, but there are also obvious architectural errors such as the south porch crashing into the first floor window. Also 1730 is extremely early for this new style of architecture to be surfacing in such a remote area as the Surrey Hills. While Inigo Jones had built the Queens House in Greenwich in 1630 in the Palladian style, it took another hundred years for it to become popular with the construction of Marble Hill House in London in 1724-9. It is inconceivable that the owner, a career soldier could have designed such a sophisticated building in what then was a new and largely unknown style. However, would a skilled architect have made some of the basic design faults that are so evident.
One intriguing possibility is that the great Palladian-inspired architect William Kent may have had a hand. It is known that he worked for the Evelyns at their nearby Wooton Estate around this time. Is it possible that he sketched a design for the Colonel and left him or a local builder to construct. It would perhaps explain the sophistication of the vision as well as the clumsiness of some of the execution. While there is no evidence of such, it would nevertheless explain how an accomplished early Palladian building came to be sitting on the downward slope of the North Downs at such an early date.
Leith Hill Place is owned by the National Trust and currently open Fridays to Sundays in summer. It is located just to the south west of Leith Hill around 2 miles from Dorking.
