Craven Cottage is top of the league

lucinda lambton

Fulham FC owes its lovely ground by the Thames to Lady Craven – and Anne Boleyn

Thousands of Fulham FC fans revere the club’s ground, Craven Cottage, on the bank of the Thames.

But how many of us know about the original Craven Cottage, the grand yet minuscule dwelling in five acres?

The cottage was set in woods used for hunting by Anne Boleyn. It was built in 1780 for a Lady Craven (1750-1828), later the Margravine of BrandenburgAnsbach-Bayreuth. She was notorious for her love affairs; she also gave her husband, the Margrave, six children by way of proof of their union.

Lady Craven was a dramatist, a composer of musical farces and the authoress of pantomimes and such works as Modern Anecdotes of the family of Kinvervankotsprakengatchder: a Tale for Christmas

From 1785 to 1786, she travelled through Central Europe to Saint Petersburg, Moscow and the Crimea, from where she sailed to Constantinople. She visited the Greek islands of Andros, Siphnos, Naxos, Antiparos and Melos and ended up again at the Bosphorus.

She had lovers galore, including William Beckford, the novelist and plutocrat. She collaborated with him on Arcadian Pastoral, a musical entertainment. She was the first to read his novel Vathek (1786), which he had sent to her in manuscript form.

Hurray for her 18th-century elegance and frailty. Hurray for a woman so ahead of her time.

What a house she did create for herself to show off her triumphs. And so it is that this little football stadium was famed throughout the land, even becoming the very nub of high culture in the British Isles.

In 1805, it was leased to Walsh Porter, an art dealer in the Prince Regent’s circle. His ‘refined taste stood alone’, according to some, but was ‘grotesque and ridiculous’, according to others.

He needed somewhere to show off both his person and his treasures and was determined to employ an aesthete to help with the transformation of his rustic retreat. It was to be a glorious transformation – according to a contemporary commentator, ‘with every architectural fancy in full and fantastical flower’.

Porter spent the vast sum of £4,000 in improving and embellishing the property to become ‘the prettiest specimen of cottage architecture then existing’. The term ‘cottage’ is a misnomer unless the average cottage had two storeys with 19 rooms decorated in a variety of sumptuous styles, including Egyptian and Gothic. The principal rooms were supported by immense columns covered in hieroglyphics or sculpted as huge palm trees with drooping foliage at the top.

The furnishings were a great glory: a movable bronze camel, a Persian chieftain’s tent, a lion and a quantity of tiger skins. The Prince Regent was so impressed with the result that he promptly commissioned the designer, a young Thomas Hopper, to work on Carlton House in Pall Mall, making his reputation as an architect.

Craven Cottage became well known for lavish, fashionable parties in the mid-1830s, when it was leased to the high-society financier Charles King.

In 1840, it was taken for six years by the writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton, author of The Last Days

Top: Lady Craven

Middle and left: Craven Cottage before Fulham FC arrived in 1896

Blow

of Pompeii. He entertained Prince Louis Napoleon at his ‘elegant little riparian retreat’. Bulwer-Lytton was followed by Sir Ralph and Lady Howard, who made the house the rendezvous of polite society. The Prince of Wales and the future Empress of the French attended some of the gatherings.

Among other visitors were Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jeremy Bentham. And, blow me down, Florence Nightingale even came here, delighting in its charms.

The glory days of Craven Cottage were over by the late 1860s, when an American entrepreneur’s scheme to turn it into a pleasure resort failed.

From 1872, it stood empty, ivycovered and picturesquely dilapidated. In the early morning of 8th May 1888, a mysterious fire broke out. The combined efforts of 26 men, two steam fire engines and a fire boat could not save it and it burnt to the ground.

Fulham’s ground, built in 1896, is now on the exact site where all these delights took place. Craven Cottage was restored in 1905 by the renowned Scottish master of football-stadium architecture Archibald Leitch.

In 1986, the land was threatened with redevelopment but survived, not least thanks to the club’s supporters roaring, ‘WE WANT CRAVEN COTTAGE … SAVE OUR CRAVEN COTTAGE!’

Hurrah for such a wildly odd turn of events.