Southill Park House

Summary

Southill till 1779

In the years after the Civil War, Sir John, later Chief Justice Kelyng, bought up property in Southill. Among his purchases was a capital messuage “formerly occupied by Sir Henry Massingberd and lying a little to the north-west of the church”. In 1693 it was sold to Admiral Sir George Byng (created Lord Torrington in 1721). It was a comfortable house with six reception rooms on the ground floor and the kitchen quarters to one side and reached by a colonnade. Byng lived there and in his son's marriage settlement, dated 1724, he gave his wife a life interest in the house he then lived in.

Yet by his will and a further settlement in 1732 he specifically gave his wife a life interest in his capital messuage “newly erected at some distance from the old one pulled down.” He wanted to build a grand house with grand gardens and canal to emphasise his and his family's importance. His grandson John Byng, the diarist, commented in 1793: “My grandfather … built Southill House in an open field; and had to plant trees, to dig canals, to make mounts, and to throw money away in vile taste.”

This evidence suggests a date for the building of the core of the present house between 1724 and 1732 indicating that Southill is not a seventeenth-century house. A sketch on Gordon's map of 1736 and one by Thomas Badeslade c.1740 show a central block connected to two square pavilions by open arcades. The central block contained a basement and two principal floors of five windows across. Only above the central three windows was another storey of bedrooms and above that attics with dormer windows. The entrance porch was columned with a pediment above carrying what appear to be the Byng coat of arms. Steps lead up to the front door on the piano nobile. The pavilions had Venetian windows. What is illustrated by these views is substantially what the first Lord Torrington built. As the time span in which he could have built the house was so short, it is unlikely that it was built in two stages.

Isaac Ware has been consistently referred to as having a major hand in the building of the pre-Holland Southill.