Details
1293/3/166
07-SEP-51
THORNCROFT DRIVE
(North side)
Thorncroft Manor
(Formerly listed as:
DORKING ROAD
Thorncroft Manor)
GV
II*
Manor house, now offices. 1772, by Sir Robert Taylor, for Henry Crabb Boulton;
enlarged and altered. White painted render (probably on brick) over a flint plinth (probably formerly rendered); slate roof. L-shaped plan formed by a rectangular double-depth main range on a north-south axis with an integral wing to the rear of the north end. Two storeys over a high basement, 5 bays, symmetrical, facing east. The basement, of slobbered flint, has windows with flint surrounds roughly keyed for former rendered finish, and altered glazing. The central entrance, up 9 steps with rusticated ashlar side walls and simple latticed wrought-iron railings, has a wide Roman Doric doorcase with engaged columns distyle in antis, triglyph frieze with guttae and mutules (these unusually furnished with sets of guttae), and pediment with similar mutules, a round-headed doorway with double doors, and narrow sashed side windows; above the pediment is a small 2-light casement flanked by single-light casements; otherwise, the ground floor has tall 8-pane sashed windows with ornamental blind-hoods, and the 1st floor has 9-pane sashes; dentilled cornice and hipped roof with 3 inserted dormers and 2 ridge chimneys. The ground floor of the 4-bay left return wall is mostly covered by extensions, and the 1st floor has two 6-pane sashes flanked by blind windows. The 6-bay right-hand return wall has a full-height canted bay in the 3rd, and fenestration matching that of the front. The rear of this wing has a round-headed doorway to the right, under a semicircular porch approached by a flight of 9 steps protected by elegant wrought-iron bar railings terminating in wreaths; one 8-pane sash to the left and three 9-pane sashes above. Interior: entrance hall with (inter alia) a coved alcove in each side flanked by coved roundels containing busts, an Ionic screen distyle in antis, dentilled cornice, and a fine open-well stone staircase with moulded soffits to the steps, and 2 slender twisted balusters per tread; to the rear of the screen, a doorway with pedimented architrave, leading in to the principal reception room of the wing, which has wall panels, marble fireplace, and dentilled cornice; off the service passage to the left of the hall, a doglegged staircase with closed string and barley-sugar balusters (perhaps surviving or re-used from earlier building on the site).
Subsidiary Features. To the rear an extension was added in 1974-6 to the designs of Michael Manser and Partners, job architects Vladimir Bogdanovich and Mark Ashmead, with Frank Dewar, that linked the manor house and stable block while making the minimal physical or visual impact on the eighteenth-century fabric. Steel frame, clad in mirror glass set in neoprene gaskets on raised brick and cobble plinth. Three storeys, the upper floor set back and canted to reflect the sky. Projecting rendered lift shaft at rear of main building never used. Interiors open plan around a central service core, designed to be flexible and not of special interest. A very elegant conservation solution to the difficult problem of adding offices to a historic country house.
'Manser's refusal to compromise is manifest by a quiet clean, visual statement that sits comfortably alongside Taylor's manor house and Brown's landscaped park, confounding the Surrey planners' worst fears' (this attribution to Lancelot Brown however remains unsubstantiated). (Building Design, 29 April 1977, p.17). The addition won an RIBA commendation in 1977.
History: Thorncroft was one of the two feudal manors of Leatherhead from Norman times, held by Merton College, Oxford, from 1266 to 1904; the house, rebuilt in timber in 1497, was occupied in the C16 and C17 by Robert Gardiner, Sergeant of the Wine Cellar to Elizabeth I; but was taken down and re-built in this form in 1776.
References: LDLHS History(passim); J.W.Lovatt The Manor of Thorncroft: a Short History (1977); M.Binney, Sir Robert Taylor: from Rococo to Neo-Classicism (1984) p.33.
Listing NGR: TQ1654155864
The listing was enhanced in 2016.
