Tile Gazetteer - Richmond upon Thames

East Sheen

Inside R. Chubb & Son, a butcher’s shop at 350 Upper Richmond Road West (a little east of Clifford Avenue) are five pictorial tile panels showing varieties of fowls.

Ham

Ham House (NT), Ham Street, was built in 1610, altered internally in 1637-8 then enlarged during 1672-4. A hefty Coade stone River God by John Bacon stands in the forecourt to the north of the house, and twelve Coade pineapples (a symbol of hospitality) of 1799-1801 decorate the forecourt railings (Fig 176). Inside the house are several plain-tiled fire surrounds dating from the 1670s, and two fire surrounds with Dutch blue and white landscape and figurative tiles of around the same date or slightly earlier. The dairy, refurbished in the early nineteenth century, is lined with plain and ivy-leaf patterned Wedgwood creamware tiles; the marble worktops are supported by cast iron cow legs.

Hampton Court

Thomas Wolsey was appointed Archbishop of York in 1514 and shortly afterwards signed a ninety-nine year lease on Hampton Court (now entered from Hampton Court Way), intending to turn it into a country seat fit for entertaining royalty; building work began almost immediately. Wolsey’s Long Gallery, built around 1515-16 and demolished in 1689, was one of the first buildings in England, possibly the very first, to have classical pilasters on its exterior. These newly fashionable decorative elements were made from terracotta, and may have been produced locally. The ten ornate terracotta roundels of 1520-1, each displaying the head of a Roman emperor, which remain at the Palace today were imported from Italy and made by the sculptor Giovanni da Maiano (Fig 177). Items of high fashion at the time, they can be seen on the walls of the Great Gatehouse, the inner gate and George II’s Gate, although they may not all be in their original positions. A terracotta plaque of Wolsey’s arms also survives on the east side of the inner gate.[1]

Hampton Hill

There is a fine display of tiled flooring in St James’s Church, St James’s Road (at the junction with Park Road), which was begun in 1864, enlarged during the 1870s and completed in 1888 with the erection of its tower. A geometric pavement in the choir leads on to more decorative paving in the sanctuary, and there are mostly geometric tile panels on the east wall to either side of the altar, as well as a tiled niche. Nothing unduly decorative but a good example of a complete scheme, with all the tiling still visible.

Hampton Wick

At the junction of Park Road and Sandy Lane (opposite Vicarage Road, which leads to Hampton Wick station) is the colourful Doultonware monument (1900) to the shoemaker Timothy Bennet (1676-1756), who undertook a lengthy campaign to open the adjoining footpath, Cobbler’s Walk, for public use; the slab shows a relief of a shoemaker at work.

Richmond

Overlooking The Green is Richmond Theatre (1899, Frank Matcham), an elaborate twin-towered red brick and buff terracotta pile. Most of its terracotta was made by the Hathern Station Brick and Terra Cotta Company, but the figure of Euterpe, the muse of music, is in material of a slightly different hue and probably came from Doulton’s.[2] The same combination of firms supplied the terracotta for Matcham’s 1901 Hackney Empire, which has an identical Euterpe on its facade; the figure was probably modelled by John Broad, who executed a similar statue for the Apollo and the Muses PH on Tottenham Court Road (1898). This latter Euterpe now stands in St George’s Gardens (see Camden).

The former dairy of J. Clarke & Sons (now a hairdresser’s) on Hill Rise, south of the centre, retains its complete early twentieth century tiled interior including half a dozen excellent but unsigned pictorial panels of pastoral scenes.

Strawberry Hill

During 1749-66 Horace Walpole transformed Strawberry Hill (now St Mary’s College, part of the University of Surrey), Waldegrave Road, turning it from a cottage into a little castle in true Gothic (or Gothick) taste. There were extensions in 1790 but the house eventually became derelict before being inherited by Lady Frances Waldegrave, who restored it in 1855-6 and added a new wing in 1860-2. She enlarged the entrance hall, replacing its hexagonal stone tiles with a five-colour carpet-pattern Minton encaustic tile pavement, and installed tiled fire surrounds throughout the house, mostly with 8” printed tiles; particularly notable are those in the Smoking Room, which are partly gilded. Strawberry Hill is currently on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk Register.

Twickenham

Above the Rowland Hill Memorial Gate at the entrance to the Twickenham headquarters of the Rugby Football Union, Whitton Road, is a gilded Coade stone lion, which like its counterpart the South Bank Lion (see Lambeth) came from Goding’s Lion Brewery (demolished 1949); it was given to the RFU by the chairman of the Greater London Council and installed at Twickenham in 1972.

References

1.^         Simon Thurley, Hampton Court: A Social and Architectural History (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003), pp22-5.
2.^         John Earl, The London Theatres, in Frank Matcham: Theatre Architect, ed Brian Walker (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1980), pp36-61.