Private history of a tycoon's mansion

If the Thames Gateway is a thoroughly modern public concept being rather dubiously attached to an excellent history project which seems to lend it some cultural status, then Sutton Place, which I came across on my stroll down the A3, is something of the opposite: a building of immense historical significance which is, and always has been, very private.

The back entrance (pictured above) to the mansion came as something of a surprise to me as I approached Guildford, in Surrey, having walked down from Burnt Common. There is no great house visible from the road, and from a car whizzing by on the A3 up to London it looks like a an impressive gateway with no further clues to what it is about. It is hardly possible to make out the name, Sutton Place, from a passing vehicle. Its history, when I came to look it up, was something of a surprise.

Sutton Place it turned out was, to quote the 20th century architectural oracle Nikolaus Pevsner, “the most important English house of the years after Hampton Court”, or as Wikipedia puts it, Sutton Place “is a Grade I listed Tudor manor house built in 1530 by Sir Richard Weston (d 1541). It is second only in importance to Hampton Court Palace in showing the earliest traces of Italianate renaissance design elements in English architecture.”

I don’t propose here to detail the architectural glories of the place or the estate or go into much of its history. It’s the surprise I’m interested in. At a time when even Buckingham Palace’s State Rooms are occasionally open to the public, when stately mansions all over the country depend on throwing their doors open to the public, and when the National Trust has, for 100 years, been bringing historic buildings into the public eye, it comes as a shock to be reminded that history can be private, no entry, keep out; that so much of history is owned by the wealthy classes and does not come into the public gaze unless the wealthy deign, or are economically squeezed, to place it there.

Sutton Place remains a very private slice of English history, held close by members of the wealthiest echelons of British society. Briefly Sir Richard Weston was an under-treasurer to Henry VIII, who stayed at Sutton in 1533. The house stayed in the Weston family until the end of the 18th century. It later passed on the Salvins, a prominent Durham family, and was for a period rented by the newspaper proprietor Alfred Harmsworth, aka the Daily Mail owner Lord Northcliffe. It was bought in 1918 by the 5th Duke of Sutherland, a Conservative Cabinet minister and Privy Councillor in the Twenties and Thirties, and head of one of the richest land-owning families in Britain. In 1959 the house was sold to oil tycoon and philanthropist Jean Paul Getty, described by Forbes magazine in 1957 as the richest American alive.

In 1976, many society parties and much Getty family drama later, the house was bought by Stanley J Seeger, an American timber and oil heir who, in turn, sold it off in 1986 for about £10million to Fred Koch, an American philanthropist. In 2004 the house was sold to Alisher Usmanov, the Russian based Uzbek billionaire, who owns a large minority shareholding in Arsenal Football Club and an even larger majority shareholding in the Russian industrial conglomerate Metalloinvest. He secretly paid £10million for the house and the surrounding 300 acres of the Sutton Estate. His identity as its owner was not known for three years, when the Sunday Times reported close friend of Usmanov’s as saying: “It’s the only property he owns in Britain and he bought it because it’s a beautiful and unique building which was in a very bad state. He is currently renovating it and wants to restore it to its former splendour.”

Sutton Place, for centuries a home to England’s ruling elite, is now the one of the chosen homes of a man who definitely qualifies for citizenship of what the Sunday Times last week called Richistan - that global superstate of wealthy plutocrats who run the world. And its history remains as private as ever.

Surrey, Ian Nairn and Nikolaus Pevsner, Penguin 1962.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton_Place,_Surrey
http://www.jwhistory.org.uk/sutton.html An excellent local history of the area
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article2652890.ece

Gateway to heaven, via Olympus?

So what is the Thames Gateway? I asked myself the question after a visit last week to the opening of the excellent Working Lives Of The Thames Gateway exhibition at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London.

I’d never heard of anything with any history called the Thames Gateway. The estuary yes, the riverside, the Thames Barrier, the dockside, there were hosts of words to describe the Thames and its activities but never actually a Thames Gateway.

John Pudney in his book London’s Docks, covers the history of the capital’s docks without one mention of a gateway. He finds that the dock workers, within the industrial society of their time “had indeed established a way of life. Their community was distinctive, geographical, shaped by the bizarre spacing of their work on the tideway between the Tower of London and Tilbury Fort.” Peter Ackroyd in his mystical journey down the Thames, finds many words for the waterway, including Sacred River, but never records a Thames Gateway.

The first mention of a Thames Gateway that I could find was in that old favourite The London Encyclopaedia, the completely revised 3rd edition, published in 2008. There among the Thames entries in the index (Thames House, Police, Polytechnic, Water Authority etc) was the Thames Gateway initiative, 681. Page 681 baffled me: fascinating references to Ranelagh Gardens (in Chelsea; Mozart once played in an orchestra stand there) and a splendid lithograph by J C Bourne of the building of the railway at Camden Town in the 1830s.

But no Thames Gateway, until, at the end of the Rainham (settlement of the ruling people ‘Roeginga-ham’) and South Hornchurch entry, I found: “The Thames Gateway initiative, announced by the government in 2002 to develop a great swathe of the riverside from Canary Wharf to the estuary with ‘sustainable communities’, made special mention of the need to preserve Rainham Marsh as ‘one of London’s last wild spaces’.”

The point being that none of the workers whose vivid memories are so fabulously recorded in the Working Lives exhibition’s well illustrated accompanying book, would have recognised themselves as working in anything called the Thames Gateway. This is a Government-created 21st century concept, as the book states. “The Gateway was created as a development zone covering six London boroughs along the Thames riverside stretching from Tower Bridge in the west to Erith and Rainham in the east. It was created as a focus for its regeneration through Government and private funding… It sought to writ large the successes of the London Docklands Development Corporation on the Isle of Dogs but on a much, much broader canvas.”

The Thames Gateway initiative became the Thames Gateway Development Corporation in 2004, and in doing so indeed writ large one of the LDDC’s great successes: in the areas it covered it removed large scale planning control from the hands of democratically elected local councillors and placed it the hands of a largely Government-appointed body. Its establishment also came in very handy the following year when the British Olympic Committee, bidding to host the 2012 Olympic Games, could honestly tell the International Olympic Committee, that the proposed 2012 London Olympic Games site fell within boundary of an area already earmarked for regeneration. This was true, for the Thames Gateway, as a concept, at the crucial geographic point, took a turn up the River Lea so that its boundaries enclosed a chunk of the Lower Lea Valley which was already part of the Lea Valley Regional Park and where the Games site was proposed. It was also handy, because the IOC, and its global sponsors including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, do love the four-yearly TV advertising bonanza to be associated with a nice slice of regeneration.

The Thames Gateway Development Corporation went from strength to strength, even though its planning control over the Olympic Games was whipped away as soon as the bid had succeeded and placed in the hands of the Olympic Development Authority (majority government appointed, with local authority nominees).

Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown waxed lyrical about the project to the Thames Gateway Forum in November 2007: “Europe’s biggest regeneration project is underway and the prospects for this area 40 miles along the Thames estuary, are once again being transformed. This will put the Thames Gateway, not just in a leadership position in Britain, but in Europe and the world, not just for economic development, but as I will suggest in a few minutes, for environmental development, as well.”

He promised £9billion would be invested in the area, over and above Crossrail, and that by 2016 there would be 160,000 new homes and 225,000 new jobs. It is impossible to assess the progress towards fulfilling these ambitions, because much of the investment was expressed in the form of school, university education and health projects. On top of that it will be difficult to monitor any double accounting that might take place over the £9.3billion being invested in Olympic infrastructure that might just get mixed up with the Thames Gateway figures…

Gordon Brown’s optimism for the project was by no means universal. That same month the House of Commons’ public accounts committee reported its concerns that the Gateway development might become a “public spending calamity”. Its chairman Edward Leigh said: “The DCLG [Department for Communities and Local Government to which TGDC was accountable] is at present manifestly not up to the job of managing the enormously ambitious enterprise of regenerating the Thames Gateway region. It still amounts to little more than a group of disjointed projects which do not add up to a programme which is purposeful and moving forward.

“The department has been incapable of taking the present rather insubstantial vision and galvanizing the multitude of central, regional and local partners in the scheme to work together to turn it into reality.” Leigh said it was “incredible” the DCLG had not yet set a budget for the project, and that the final cost to the taxpayer was still unclear.

It is difficult see where the TGDC is going at the moment. In its 2009 - 2010 annual report the TGDC boasts that, during that year, it invested £39.4million in the area. It also said that the corporation had granted planning consents for 4,462 homes and office space providing capacity for 3,542 jobs. These figures bear little relation to the grandiose numbers bounced around three years ago by the former prime minister.

Working Lives Of The Thames Gateway was produced by Eastside Community Heritage, which was founded in 1999 and therefore has had a longer working life than the Thames Gateway. The project was funded by the National Heritage Lottery fund. The histories and interviews are excellent and their value will easily outlast their spurious heritage attachment to a rather unconvincing development concept and its struggling Development Corporation.

The voices are genuine and the old demands of the East End still ring true.

Sadly, the following quote is not one of the National Heritage Lottery Fund sponsored quotations. It was the view of the East End Dockland Action Group, in 1970, recorded by Pudney. “We want the riverside to be enjoyed by all the people - not to be parcelled off for sale to the rich. We have no use for safari parks, yachting marinas and luxury hotels. Local people must decide what is to happen to their area. We want genuine participation in planning and we will not be fobbed off with silly public relations exercises.”

Exhibition reviewed at Culture24 (plus see, right, the History Student blog)

Pudney, John. London’s Docks, 1975, Thames & Hudson Ltd.

Ackroyd, Peter. Thames. 2007. Chatto & Windus.

The London Encyclopedia (revised third edition). 2008. Macmillan.