WILLIAM CHAMBERS’ OTHER PAGODA

BLACKHEATH PAGODA IN 1925

BY HUON MALLALIEU

In September and October 1815 a near 50 year-old former pawn-broker, tax collector and draper found fame in yet another career as a competitive walker. For £100 wager he was to walk 1,000 miles in 1,000 hours around Blackheath, the open area that adjoins Greenwich Park in south-east London. Crowds massed to watch, bet and drink, with the Hare and Billet public house alone selling “thousands of quarts” of beer (one quart equaling 1.14 litres), and sideshows included a small herd of elephants. Thanks to public rowdiness, hostile magistrates and serious rain, Wilson did not quite win his challenge, but the £100 was rapidly raised for him on the London Stock Exchange.

Naturally, such an event attracted popular printmakers, and in an etched caricature by George Woodward behind the figure of the “Blackheath Pedestrian” can be seen the profile of a small and unusual building at the edge of the Heath. This is the Blackheath Pagoda, which, like its more elaborate and famous contemporary at Kew in south-west London, owes its form to the Anglo-Swedish architect Sir William Chambers (1723 - 96).

Chambers was a son of a Scottish merchant established in Gothenburg, after whose death 1735, he was sent to a cousin in Yorkshire to be educated. At 16 he joined the Swedish East India Company, sailing to Bengal as a cadet in 1740 - 2. In the following years he made two voyages to China, serving as a supercargo. The roundtrip to Canton usually took an average of 18 months, but the first voyage for Chambers took 31, and a third of the crew perished. It has been said that during his second Canton visit he made detailed drawings of Chinese buildings and furnishings, but there is no evidence for this. As the China coast specialist Dr Patrick Conner, who has generously shared his research with me, puts it: “One simple (although not conclusive) reason for doubting whether Chambers made detailed drawings in Canton is that no such drawings are known. Many other drawings by Chambers survive from later phases of his career, but none from China.”

In fact, Westerners were not allowed into the walled city itself, and would quite likely be met with hostility if they tried to penetrate it. Furthermore, even outside the walls they were closely controlled as to what they could visit. When he came to describe one of the plates in his Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils, published in 1757, Chambers glossed this over with the note: “I do not pretend to give this as a very accurate plan; exact measures of Chinese buildings are of small consequence to European artists; and it is a matter of great difficulty to measure any publick work in China with accuracy, because the people are very troublesome to strangers, throwing stones and offering other insults”. He does not seem to have observed that the three towers that he would have seen outside Canton, adhered to the Chinese rule of odd numbered storeys, while his Great Pagoda at Kew has ten, and Blackheath two.

When he talked of basing his work on “original” drawings, he did not necessarily mean his own. He was familiar with prints of Chinese buildings by earlier travelling artists, and, like many of his mercantile colleagues, he commissioned and brought back reverse paintings on glass. European glass was carried on outward voyages to be painted by Chinese specialists, and since he could, presumably, stipulate the subjects, he could acquire reference stock in this way.

However, the fact that Chambers was known to have spent time in China was enough for him to be credited as the great expert of the day. In a remarkably short time after his settlement in England in 1755, he counted the Royal family and numerous dukes among his clients, and George III not only recognised the knighthood of the Polar Star awarded him by the King of Sweden, but allowed him to assume the style of an English knight. This explains the caption of a caricature print of him published by Mary Darly in 1773: “From North to South, I came forth right, By favour in duplici modo a knight, In primis an Ass, secundus a Bear, The one is a Fact, the other is Fair”. It may be that not everyone was completely convinced. On his return to Europe he studied in Paris, and then Rome where Robert Adam first met him and wrote spikily that “ he both knows well & draws exquisitely… He despises others as much as he admires his own talents, which he shows with a slow and dignified air, conveying an idea of great wisdom…” Adam, of course, was also a Scot hoping to make his name as an architect and designer in London.

The Blackheath Pagoda was built in the “Remote Gardens”, a patch of land detached from the principal grounds of Montague House, a comparatively small property of the Dukes of Montague and their heirs, the Earl of Cardigan and Dukes of Buccleuch. For many years the origin of the Pagoda was a matter of conjecture, and it was often assumed to be a 19th century building, because of its Victorian additions. However, it has now been established that it dates from 1767, when the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch took over the Blackheath properties on marriage to Lady Mary Montague. Her parents had subscribed to Chambers’ 1757 publication, and he was already working for the Duke elsewhere. The Remote Gardens, leased from the Earls of Dartmouth, the area’s largest landlords, had no buildings, and a summer house and stabling were required. Chambers’ much loftier Kew Pagoda dates from 1761-2, and even though that may have prompted it, in its early days the Blackheath summer house was referred to as the “India Room”, a common usage for anything broadly Oriental. At the same time, the Buccleuchs commissioned a portable canvas pagoda, probably for use during archery meetings of the Toxophilite Society on the Heath. A successor tent made in about 1805 survives at Boughton, and a similar portable Chinese Temple was made for Lord Scarsdale at Kedleston, Derbyshire, in 1769.

BLACKHEATH PEDESTRIAN

BLACKHEATH PAGODA

The Pagoda’s upturned Chinese roof and moon window would have been visible from Montague House, with the less Chinese motif of a thistle on the gable. This is likely to allude to the Duke’s admission to the Scottish Order of the Thistle, also in 1767. Unfortunately no early interior views of the Pagoda and its furnishings are known, although an inventory of the early contents of the “Indian Room” has been discovered.

By 1799 the Buccleuchs had left Montague House and the Pagoda, letting them to Caroline, Princess of Wales, who was in need of a residence after the acrimonious collapse of her marriage to the future George IV. She held her alternative court there until 1812, and she established a nursery school with a vegetable garden in the Pagoda, then called the Pavilion. A smitten local poet, Thomas Noble wrote:

“There the Pavilion with fantastic roof Reflects the glistening sunbeam, while around Young Vegetation lifts his verdant brows And in a thousand forms obeys the call Of genial Warmth: - A beauteous Princess here Receives the earliest offerings of the Spring.”

The fantastic roof was probably covered in copper, rather than lead, at that period. Pupils at the school included at least one who was suspected of being the Princess’s own child, and in the later stages of the divorce proceedings she was accused of carrying on many adulterous affairs there.

The property then reverted to the Dartmouth estate, and throughout the following century it was occupied, and developed by a series of tenants. In 1873, when it had been considerably enlarged, auction particulars for the lease said that the Pagoda was “built in a most substantial manner in the Eastern and extremely picturesque style of architecture”. Bizarrely, though, for the 1925 sale it was described as a “Tudor style property built in 1738 by the Duke of Buccleuch” - wrong in almost every particular, except that some interiors had indeed been given Tudor panelling. However, Frank Butcher, the owner at that time, collected Oriental works of art and adapted the drawing room to show them.

By the 1950s the Pagoda was used as a children’s home, and in the late 1980s as a temporary home for Tamil refugees. Lewisham Council took it on in 1990, and it was threatened with demolition before being bought by an architect who restored it as his home. Sold again in 2012, it remains a private residence.

With thanks to Dr Patrick Conner; Scott Macdonald at Boughton House; and the Blackheath Society.

HUON MALLALIEU

Huon Mallalieu is an historian who writes on art, antiques and collecting for The Times, Country Life and The Oldie. He is the author or editor of many books, including The Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists and Understanding Watercolours (both Antique Collectors’ Club) and 1066 and Rather More, a Walk through History (Frances Lincoln). He is an FSA and an Hon RWS.