This one isn’t really a window – more a doorway. But I like the look of it and it’s got a good story, so I included it in my architectural tour of Dulwich.
It’s an archway in what today we call Ruskin Park. But it hasn’t always been a park. In the late 1700s there stood a row of houses here. Eight of the original houses facing the road were demolished to make way for the formation of the park in 1907. And luckily for us, someone was clever enough to leave behind a reminder what stood here before.
The remains of the house we’re looking at now come from what was once number 170 Denmark Hill. The building is described in an English Heritage historical survey from 1956 as being almost identical to the house next door which was:
“a large detached house of late 18th century date, with a wide-fronted centre of three storeys and one-storey wings fronted by colonnades of three bays. The stock brick front was a balanced design in which paired windows flanked the central porch and an elaborated first-floor window, the windows generally being rectangular and without architraves, their heights proportioned to the three storeys.”
The description gets a bit hairy after this, and talks about “crowning mutule cornice”, “triglyphed entablature” and “wide segmental-headed opening.” I think we’ll leave the architectural history there. The only last point to note in the description is “the ground storey of the garden front projected from the body of the house, having at its centre a recessed portico,” which is what we must be looking at here.
And who lived here?
It was home, apparently, to Captain James Wilson between 1799 and 1814. Wilson was 39 when he moved in, but he’d already had an adventurous life at sea. He’d been present at the Battles of Lexington and Bunker‘s Hill and was confined nearly two years in the Black Hole at Seringapatam. He is also said to have served in the London Missionary Society as Honorary Commander of the ‘Duff’, the first British Missionary Ship of modern times.
Quite the chap – and it must have been quite the house too, if this was just the portico for the front door.
Do you know of other architectural fragments with good stories behind them in the local area? Please do get in touch if so – we’d love to hear about them.
For more details on the history of the houses which used to stand in Ruskin Park, and for thousands more pages of great historical content, take a look at the British History Online website – a favourite browsing and snooping spot of mine and source for much of the information in this post.
Images: thanks to Ingrid.
