The Linley Sambourne House in Kensington

Linley Samburne House, 18 Stafford Terrace, Kensington, London

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What first struck me about the Linley Sambourne House was the time capsule element. What next struck me was the contrast between it and the nearby Leighton House Museum.

Edward Linley Sambourne (but nobody ever called him by his first name) was a famous Victorian era illustrator, perhaps best known for his work for the satirical magazine, Punch. While both he and Leighton were artists living in an enclave of artists and writers in Kensington, their work, circumstances, and abodes were altogether different.

The house at No. 18 Stafford Terrace was a revelation. We had been staying in a flat in a Victorian-era house. Ours, like so many, had retained only a few of its original features—which makes sense, given the development of things like indoor plumbing, electricity, etc., since the 1850s (when many of these houses were built in Kensington).

However, at Sambourne House, thanks to Mr. Sambourne’s descendants, time stands still for the most part, allowing us to time travel to a middle-class Victorian household. While this was the home of an artist, and reflects that fact, the layout and a great deal of the decoration reflects the taste of the time. And it gave me, finally, a clear sense of the way a London townhouse would be laid out in the 19th century. Yes, I look at floor plans and photos, but nothing compares to being there, and a little imagination allows one to extrapolate from the 1870s to the 1830s.

Since the house was so interesting, and rather like Ham House, a rare survivor, I have many images, which means our tour will be in two parts.

The lavatory under the stairs is a great example of the time capsule element. In most houses, areas like this have been modernized. Also, the level of design was so impressive. The Victorians and their predecessors wanted everyday items to be beautiful as well as functional.

This reel takes us through the entrance hall into the dining room.

The dining room is much as it was in 1877, and like so many other parts of the house, needs video to truly give you a sense of the place.

Collecting the blue and white porcelain plates was a fashion craze among artists in the 1870s. The glass case fitted to the window is a rare survivor. Cultivating ferns and other plants in these cases was another Victorian fashion. Similar cases were once attached to the Drawing Room windows on the floor above—which I’ll get to in the next blog post.

The Morning Room reel completes our tour of the ground floor. This was primarily Marion Sambourne’s domain. This wall, like that of the Dining Room, is divided into three tiers, and the faded paper comes closest to showing what the house would have looked like in the 1870s. Right after purchasing the house, the Sambournes knocked out the rear wall and installed the beautiful window.

In the next blog post, we’ll look at the first and second floors (U.S. second and third floors ).

Searching for the sites in "My Inconvenient Duke"

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Ready for lunch at Ye Olde Cock Tavern

Please brace yourself for some extremely nerdy history—and yes, let’s start by saying I can get a little obsessive about historical details.

For the most part, when writing my stories, I’m living in the past, via books (some of them quite old and crumbling) and online sites. Every book also requires me to consult several maps, from different years. Coordinating between the early 1800s and the 2020s helps me work out distances (not always clear on old maps) and helps me calculate travel times (via online tools + aforesaid crumbling books).

So, yes, I do my best to be accurate. But when I’m in London, I can’t resist checking: finding the places and making sure I got things right. There’s also the thrill of finding a building, for instance, that’s still there. It doesn’t matter if I already know it’s still there. I get excited, as I did the day I was walking alongside the Thames in Richmond, and saw, peeping out over the trees, the top of what I felt certain was Asgill House, aka Ithaca House, where Raven Radford’s parents live in Dukes Prefer Blondes. Yes, I knew it was in Richmond, close to the river—hadn’t I researched the daylights out of it? All the same, to stand in front of it and get a sense of the environment was a joy, which I shared with you in my Asgill House post.

Another place I knew still existed was the Cock Tavern, where Blackwood meets Maggie Proudie, in My Inconvenient Duke. It dates to the 1500s, though changes have occurred. The most startling one—and the one I forgot when I was standing in Fleet Street, baffled (this often happens, as I have no sense of direction)—was that it had moved across the street in the 1880s, fifty years after the time of the story. Then, in the 1990s, a fire destroyed the interior. It was rebuilt, using old photographs, but it does not look as it did in the 1880s, as you can see if you view some of the images at the London Picture Archives.

What it looked like in 1832 is anybody’s guess. I suspect that the sort of layout we see in the 1880s (Image #3) isn’t completely different from the 1830s. It very likely would have had boxes (in the U.S. we call them booths) similar to those in Image #4, a Thomas Rowlandson print of 1800, of another tavern on Fleet Street, either the Rainbow or the Wheatsheaf.

Another, much more elusive location was the site of the Holland Arms, which became the Lovedon Arms in the Blackwoods’ story. I knew that the inn no longer existed, but I wanted to find where it used to be, an interesting challenge in the Kensington High Street. As mentioned in my notes to the book, the Holland Arms was also referred to as the White Hart and the White Horse in some sources.

Image #1 shows it as the White Hart on the travel map in Cecil Aldin’s The Romance of the Road. Image #2 is an 1832 map of the area of Kensington where Blackwood and Alice search for Ripley. The 1827 map in Image #3 pinpoints two locations: the Holland Arms/White Hart/White Horse to the left and the toll gate to the right. #4 is the Holland Arms as it appeared in Leigh Hunt’s The Old Court Suburb (1855). #5 and #6 show where it stood. That’s me, looking triumphant, once I felt sure this was the place. Image #7 is the Kensington tollgate. And #8 was the big surprise. I kept looking at the building and wondering if that had been a tollgate. After double and triple checking the location, I feel reasonably certain that this was site of the Kensington tollgate. I know the gates were abolished in 1865. However, I don’t know if the toll-keeper’s building survived. Is this the original building, renovated? Another building erected on the site? What’s its current function? More sleuthing required.

Ham House Part 2

Ham House, Richmond

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I’ve offered a few views of the North Drawing Room in the previous blog post, but reels give a better sense of the environment. The tapestries show farming activities during the year. Milking in April, Sheep-Shearing and Hay-Making in June & July, Reaping in May and August, Plowing and Sowing in September, and Wine-making in October. Though they were woven between 1699 and 1719, they were not hung in this room until early in the 20th century. According to the guidebook, the tapestries hanging in this room in the 1600s depicted the story of Phaeton, and “Tapestry was then the ultimate form of luxury room decoration.”

The Queen’s Bedchamber gets a reel, too. It stopped being a bedchamber and turned into a drawing room in the 1740s.

The Queen’s Closet did not get that kind of makeover. It’s very much as it was originally. The oval image is on the ceiling. Only the most honored guests would be invited here. I don’t know whose shoes these are—the guidebook is silent, because things get moved around, and this layout is a little different from the guidebook—but I assume they date to the 17th century.

The ebony cabinet stands in the Duke’s Dressing Room. The other two images are of the Duke’s Closet, a much smaller and more private room. The original upholstery and wall hangings were, according to the guidebook, “black and olive damask with a scarlet fringe and silver and black edging.”

People are always curious about cleanliness in past times. While they didn’t bathe according to our standards, our ancestors kept as clean as they could, given their circumstances. They changed their undergarments frequently, because these could be easily laundered. People took daily sponge baths—if they could. Cleanliness did depend on economics. If you’re a pauper, your first concern is staying alive. If, on the other hand, you’re a duchess, you’ve got servants to fill your bathtub and make everything pleasant for you. And certainly, as is the case today, some people simply won’t bother. For instance, the 11th Duke of Norfolk (1746-1815) had an aversion to soap and water. The servants had to wait until he was dead drunk in order to bathe him. One of his wives died in childbirth and the other one went insane. But he had mistresses! They must have had strong stomachs.