A little way along the Thames from Marble Hill which I wrote about last week is  perhaps the most important of those 18th century riverside sites:  the last remaining part of the villa, grotto and garden built on the banks of the Thames  by the poet Alexander Pope in the 1720s.

Although the house itself was demolished less than a hundred years later, and the garden has long been built over,  somehow the grotto survived, although it has lost most of its decoration and its view. (and yes grottos can have views!).  Although listed as Grade 2* it was also listed as  Heritage at Risk,  but now supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund the grotto is now slowly being conserved by the Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust.

Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688.  His father was a convert to Catholicism   in a period when Catholics were severely limited not only  in how they could worship but also in the opportunities that were open to them. It meant that although he was clearly intelligent – indeed precocious – Pope would be  unable to go to  university and was debarred from ‘Posts of Profit or of Trust‘.   There was however a supportive network of fellow catholics and sympathisers which he was later to connect with.

He also became severely ill at a young age with  Pott’s disease (tuberculosis of the bone),  probably  contracted in infancy from the milk of his nurse. It restricted  his growth to about 4ft 6in [1.37 m], gave him fevers, as well severe problems with his eyes, heart and lungs. .

Neither of these barriers stopped him learning, and when he only about fifteen, he resolved to “go up to London and learn French and Italian” and more importantly begin serious writing. He managed to enter London literary circles meeting dramatists William Wycherley, a closet catholic, and William Congreve who praised his early poems. These were  published as Pastorals in  1709 by Jacob Tonson, the leading publisher of the day. It  included the famous lines that were set to music by Handel in his opera Semele:   “Where-e’er you walk, cool Gales shall fan the Glade,//Trees, where you sit, shall crowd into a Shade.” [Click here to hear it]

Pope  then began  the massive task of translating  Homer’s Iliad  from the original Greek which was to take him seven years.  Its publication  bought him not only an almost instant literary reputation but enough money to set up his own household.

Roughly half way between Hampton Court and Richmond, Twickenham was then becoming attractive to Londoners looking for rural retreats, and in today’s terminology was ripe for gentrification.  In 1719  Pope moved there, with his elderly mother and nurse,  taking  a lease of some cottages  on the busy  road close to the Thames known as Cross Deep. At the same time he acquired about 5 acres of land for a garden on the other side of the road.

Pope  employed the architect James Gibbs, a fellow Catholic,  to design a villa for him. It was 3 storied, about 60ft wide and 30 deep, perhaps reflecting both Pope’s stature and moderate wealth.  Horace Walpole apparently described it rather cruelly as “small and bad”.    The villa was conventionally classical in style, and sometimes described, although not terribly accurately, as Palladian.  Work began in 1720 and that year Pope also obtained permission to construct a tunnel so that he could go from his new house to his new  garden without needing to cross the road.  Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets said that by doing this Pope “extracted an ornament from an inconvenience,” while “vanity produced a grotto where necessity enforced a passage.”

 

In the centre of the ground floor of the house on the river side was a wide entrance arch, said to resemble the water entrance to a palazzo in Venice, with stairs inside  that  led up into  the villa for those arriving by river. It also served as the starting point for the tunnel under the road.

Did the idea for the grotto come from the construction of the tunnel? Who knows – but certainly such features were common enough in Pope’s day, as they had been since the Renaissance, while the idea  that they were a haunt of the Muses had been a literary trope since classical times and  was particularly popular  among the poets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Initially what Pope created was similar to the classical nymphaeum: a supposedly “natural” cave  with running water, and overhanging rocks, that was  home to a nymph.

At the entrance was  a plaque with a quotation from Horace, which translated as: ‘A hid Recess, where Life’s revolving Day,/In sweet Delusion gently steals away’. It might have been home to the Muses, but it was also a place of retreat.

Both the tunnel and first stage of the grotto were finished by June 1725 when he wrote  to his friend Edward Blount that : “I have put the last Hand to my works of this kind, in happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto.”

The similarity to a nymphaeum was confirmed when  “I there found a Spring of the clearest Water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thro’ the Cavern day and night.”   Sadly he didn’t find the nymph, nor has she been found [so far!] during restoration work.

At this point the grotto was  probably not that much more than a simple passageway  which widened out in the centre to form a small dark room.   The archway entrance was wider and much lighter but when the doors were shut “it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera obscura, on the Walls of which all the objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture.”  That’s what has been captured in the animation.    The walls were  already well ornamented because “when you have a mind to light it up, it affords you a very different Scene: it is finished with Shells interspersed with Pieces of Looking-glass in angular forms; and in the Ceiling is a Star of the same Material, at which when a Lamp (of an orbicular Figure of thin Alabaster) is hung in the Middle, a thousand pointed Rays glitter and are reflected over the Place.”

The floor was “paved with simple Pebble, as the adjoining Walk up the Wilderness to the Temple, is to be Cockle-shells, in the natural Taste, agreeing not ill with the little dripping Murmur, and the Aquatic Idea of the whole Place.”  And to finish it all off  “it wants nothing …  but a good Statue with an Inscription, like that beautiful antique one which you know I am so fond of: Nymph of the Grot, these sacred Springs I keep,//And to the Murmur of these Waters sleep.”

It was clear too from this letter that a lot of work had been done in Pope’s new garden as well because “From the River Thames, you see thro’ my Arch up a Walk of the Wilderness to a kind of open Temple, wholly compos’d of Shells in the Rustic Manner; and from that distance under the Temple you look down thro’ a sloping Arcade of Trees, and see the Sails on the River passing suddenly and vanishing, as thro’ a Perspective Glass.”  [More on Pope’s Garden another day.]

But, of course, Pope was not satisfied.

In 1732 he asked William Kent to design a portico for the Thames frontage to give it a bit more class. He also asked Lord Burlington, who was still his patron as he was of Kent,  but got the  rather sniffy response that  “I have considered your front and am of opinion that my friend Kent has done all that he can, considering the place”.

 

More significantly after a visit to Bristol in 1739 where he saw  the minerals and rocks at Clifton Gorge and Hotwell Spa, Pope decided to give the grotto a complete makeover, and turn it into what Mary Wellesley, writing in the London Review of Books called “a shrine to the majesty of geology.”  He  was probably influenced by his friend William Borlase, an antiquarian and clergyman, who espoused ‘physico-theological’ ideas about geology as evidence of the work of God.  Over the next four years the grotto was transformed. The result was described by his gardener, John Serle, in a short book about the grotto which came with a plan identifying the decorations in each section.

In March 1740 Pope wrote to Borlase who had sent him a parcel of minerals to add to the grotto walls: “your Bounty, like that of Nature, confounds all choice. But as I would imitate rather her Variety, than make Ostentation of what we call her Riches.I shall be satisfy’d if you make your next Cargo consist more of such Ores or Sparrs as are beautiful, & not too difficult to be come at, than of the Scarce & valuable kinds.

He also asked Borlase how to best place the rocks  “to make the Place resemble Nature in all her workings, & entertain a Sensible, as well as dazzle a Gazing Spectator.”

He wrote  again a few months later on 8th June 1740 telling Borlase the work was  “now half finished, the ruder parts entirely so; in its present condition it is quite natural, and can only admit of more beauties by the Glitter of more minerals, not the disposition or manner of placing them, with which I am quite satisfy’d. I have managed the Roof so as to admit of the larger as well as smaller pendulous [crystals]; the sides are strata of various, beautiful, but rude Marbles, between which run the Loads of Metal, East and West, and in the pavement also, the direction of the Grotto happening to lie so.”

Now Pope gets a bit carried away and decided the grotto needed extending. He  “opened the whole into one Room, groin’d above from pillar to pillar (not of a regular Architecture, but like supporters left in a Quarry), by which means there is a fuller Light cast into all but the narrow passage (which is cover’d with living and long Mosse).”

More light was provided by  “two Glasses [mirrors] artfully fix’d reflect the Thames, and almost deceive the Eye to that degree as to seem two arches opening to the River on each side, as there is one real in the middle. The little well is very light, ornamented with Stalactites above, and Spars and Cornish Diamonds on the Edges, with a perpetual drip of water into it from pipes above among the Icicles.”

Now of course he needed even more decorative material so he “cry’d help to some other friends, as I found my Want of materials, and have stellifyed some of the Roof with Bristol stone of a fine lustre. I am in hopes of some of the Red transparent Spar from the Lead mines, which would vastly vary the colouring. …  

As more specimens arrived he went on  “enriching the Crannies and Interstices” while    ‘The perpendicular Fissures I generally fill with Spar.

In the end he received  over 140  contributions.  These were described in great detail by John Serle,   and must have made an impressive and very glittery sight when installed.

 

 

There were “Several fine Fossils and Snake-stones, with petrified  Wood, and Moss” while the Duchess of Cleveland sent “several sorts of Italian sparry Marble”, several “clumps” of   Amethysts , with some fine Pieces of White Spar”.  There was “Plymouth marble”,  slag from glass factories, “incrustations from Mr. Allen’s Quarries”,  together with “pieces of the Eruptions from Mount Vesuvius”, gold and silver ores from South America, corals and “many other curious Stones from the Island of St. Christopher in the West Indies”, a stalagmite from Wookey Hole and  “two Stones from the Giants Causeway in Ireland, from Sir Hans Sloane”.   Other specimens came from Norway, Egypt, Spain, Mexico,Peru, and Brazil.

Despite all these gifts the whole thing cost  Pope a lot of money, with a friend estimating it at  over £1000.

 

Serle’s plan shows how the grotto was arranged.  Facing the Thames  was the  light and airy porch area, at right angles to the tunnel, where the walls   were covered  with crystals, and ores. There was  statue at either end, and the decoration was completed with, amongst other things,  petrified moss and “several Humming Birds and their Nests” as well as the basalt pieces from   the Giant’s Causeway.

The central chamber was lined with the minerals including “large clumps of Cornish diamonds.” On either side of that were two smaller spaces. On the left what was later called  “The Cave of Pope” which had  busts and urns and walls finished with the usual minerals, gems and  fossils, while  the roof was made of “small stones, incrusted over, out of the river Thames.”   On the right hand side was the pool – called a bagnio [or bath] by Pope  around which “were fixed different Plants, such as Maidenhair, Hartstongue, Fern, and several other Plants, intermix’d with many Petrifactions, and some uncommon Cornish Diamonds, from Lord Godolphin’s great Copper-works in Ludgvan.”

Serle’s account also includes a series of poems about the grotto including some  by Pope himself, and we’ll see extracts from another by Robert Dodsley shortly.  When fellow poet William Mason published his poem Musaeus in memory of Pope in 1747 the title page had an engraving  showing Pope dying in the grotto slumped in a chair, and being consoled by the figure of Virtue, while Chaucer, Milton and Spencer stand by.

After his death on 30 May 1744, nine days after his 56th birthday, the grotto became  a popular resort of tourists, sightseers and admirers of his work.   Unfortunately, as prophesied by Robert Dodsley these visitors also began to take the grotto’s minerals as souvenirs.

In 1807 the villa  was bought by Baroness Howe who  quickly became annoyed with the numbers  who wanted admittance  so she took the rather drastic step of demolishing the house  and  building a new home next door. While the grotto itself remained intact  she also removed most of its remaining decorations.

Eventually a  a Tudor Gothic house was built on the site and   in 1919 that was taken over by a Catholic school and substantially altered. It’s likely that’s when the present statues – one if St James of Compostela and the other a rather strange figure perhaps of the Virgin Mary were installed in the two side chambers.

In 1996 a Charitable Trust was created to preserve the grotto. The house is now home to  Radnor House School, who are committed  to the conservation project. The Trust started opening the grotto regularly to the public in 2016  so check the next open days on their website  and go along to become  one of the “strangers” in Dodsley poem.  You won’t regret it!

For more information there’s no better place to start than the Preservation Trust’s website, which has a talk on the grotto by Professor Judith Hawley, one of the trustees and an animated film of a visit by river to the grotto and lots of other information and links.