Kingston Lacy

Kingston Lacy
The south and west sides of Kingston Lacy house
Alternative names	Kingston Hall
General information
Type	Country house
Architectural style	Italianate architecture
Town or city	Wimborne Minster, Dorset
Country	England
Coordinates	50°48′39.39″N 2°1′56.12″W
Construction started	1663
Completed	1665
Client	Sir John Bankes Sir Ralph Bankes.
Owner	National Trust
Technical details
Structural system	Red brick, later encased in Chilmark stone
Material	Red brick
Floor count	4 (2x main floors; 1x basement; 1x attic)
Grounds	164 hectares (410 acres) (5 hectares (12 acres) of gardens and pleasure grounds; 159 hectares (390 acres) of park and other ornamented land)
Design and construction
Architect(s)	Roger Pratt
Other designers	Inigo Jones (Interiors)
Designations	Grade I listed
Renovating team
Architect(s)	Charles Barry

Kingston Lacy is an country house and estate near Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England. It was for many years the family seat of the Bankes family; they had previously resided nearby at nearby Corfe Castle until its destruction in the English Civil War after its incumbent owners, Sir John Bankes and Dame Mary, had remained loyal to Charles I.

The house was built between 1663 and 1665 by Ralph Bankes, son of Sir John Bankes, to a design by the architect Sir Roger Pratt. It is a rectangular building with two main storeys, attics and basement, modelled on Chevening in Kent. The gardens and parkland were laid down at the same time, including some of the fine specimen trees that are in existence today. Various additions and alterations were made to the house over the years and the estate remained in the ownership of the Bankes family from the 17th to the late 20th centuries.

The house was designated as a Grade I listed building in 1958 and the park and gardens are included in the National Register of Historic Parks and Gardens at Grade II. The house was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1981. Both house and gardens are open to the public.

History

The grounds on which Kingston Lacy stand originally formed part of a royal estate within the manor of Wimborne. The original house, greatly developed in the medieval period, stood to the north of the current house and was used as a hunting lodge, in connection with the deer park to its northwest. Leased to those who found favour with the monarch, lessees included the Lords de Lacys, Earls of Lincoln, who held it in addition to estates at Shapwick and Blandford. By the 15th century the property was leased to John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, whose daughter Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII, was brought up at Kingston Lacy.

In the 17th century Corfe Castle was demolished by order of parliament

By the 16th century the house was in ruins. In 1603 King James I gave the lands to Sir Charles Blount. In 1636, his son sold the estate to Sir John Bankes, who had been appointed attorney general to King Charles I in 1634. Sir John was born in Cumberland, but through his extensive legal works had acquired sufficient funds to purchase the Corfe Castle estate. During the English Civil War, the Bankes remained loyal to the crown, resulting in the death of Sir John at Oxford in 1644. Left to fend for herself during two sieges, his wife Mary Bankes gallantly defended Corfe Castle, but it eventually fell to the Parliamentary forces. In March 1645 Parliament voted to slight (demolish) the castle, and it was left in its present ruinous state. Although deprived of their castle, the Bankes family still owned some 8,000 acres (3,200 ha) of the surrounding Dorset countryside and coastline. The masonry from the destroyed building was used by local villagers to rebuild their own residences.

After the death of Sir Ralph in 1677, the house was leased by his widow from 1686 and 1688 to the Duke of Ormonde. John Bankes the Elder regained the property in 1693, and with his wife Margaret, daughter of Sir Henry Parker of Honington Hall, Warwickshire completed the majority of his fathers original development plan. After passing to his second son Henry in 1772, he remodelled the house, built a new servants wing, and enclosed the parkland for better agricultural management use.

The 1784 Enclosure Act allowed Henry Bankes the Younger, the grandson of Ralph Bankes, to create the current estate and park lands footprint. This allowed him to remove the hamlet of Kingston, situated adjacent to the 16th-century Keeper's Lodge, divert the B3082 Blandford Road and convert the former agricultural land to parkland. He undertook some further minor alterations in the 1820s, before he became an MP for the rotten borough of Corfe. He was a trustee for the British Museum and its parliamentary advocate, and some of his collections which were once part of the house, now reside in the Museum. Bankes often entertained his friends William Pitt the Younger and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington at the house.

Bankes' son, the explorer and adventurer William John Bankes, commissioned his friend Charles Barry (later Sir Charles Barry, known for his re-visioning works on the Palace of Westminster) to encase the red brick hall, and enlarge his other property Soughton Hall. The house, now to be known as Kingston Lacy, was extensively remodelled by Barry between 1835 and 1838. The work involved facing the brick with Chilmark stone, adding a tall chimney at each corner, and lowering the ground level on one side, exposing the basement level and forming a new principal entrance. He also planted Lime tree avenues along the Blandford Road, of which some 3.5 kilometres (2.2 mi) still survive.

William John Bankes provided most of the antiquities that currently form part of the house's collections. He travelled extensively to the Middle East and the Orient, collecting the largest individual collection of Egyptian antiques in the world. Most notable is the Philae obelisk, which he brought back and which now stands prominently in the grounds of the house. He also acquired in Genoa, Italy the portrait of Maria Di Antonio Serra, by Sir Peter Paul Rubens, painted on the occasion of her marriage to Duke Nicolo Pallavicini in 1606. In 1841, after being caught in a homosexual scandal that could have resulted in a trial and his death, William John fled the country for Italy. His art collection was left behind at Kingston Lacy, where his notes and drawings remained for many years in a cabinet, unpublished and forgotten.

During William John's absence the estate had been managed by his brother, Canon George Bankes, who inherited the estate on his brother's death, but a year before his own in 1857. His youngest grandson Walter Ralph inherited the estate in 1869, and in his later life married Henrietta, and had a son Henry John Ralph Bankes. On Walter's death in 1902, his widow undertook the last major developments to the existing estate, including construction of the church (1907), new entrance lodges (1912–13) and numerous estate cottages. In 1923 control passed to Ralph Bankes, the seven times great-grandson of the original creator Sir Ralph Bankes. During World War II an extensive military encampment was established in the south-east quarter of the park, which was only restored after the National Trust took ownership. Upon his death in 1981, Ralph bequeathed the Kingston Lacy estate (including 12 working farms and Corfe Castle) to the National Trust, its largest bequest to date.

Architecture

Sir Ralph Bankes, during whose life Kingston Lacy was constructed, portrait by Sir Peter Lely.

After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the Bankes family regained their properties. Rather than rebuild the ruined Corfe Castle, eldest son Ralph Bankes chose to build a new house on their other Dorset estate near Wimborne Minster. In 1663, Ralph commissioned Sir Roger Pratt to design a new property to be known as Kingston Hall on the current site, based on Clarendon House which Ralph had visited several times. Construction of the building started that same year, and was completed by 1665.

The design, like Pratt's other large country house Horseheath Manor in Cambridgeshire, was much influenced by Chevening. Like that house, the hall is two storeys high, though the great stair has been moved from the centre of the house" Instead the great stair and the back stairs are situated symmetrically on either side of the hall, on the main long axis of the house.

Pratt's original plans have been lost, but extensive notes on his intentions have survived. On each of the two main floors he placed identical apartments about 20 ft (6 m) square at the four corners, each with two 10 ft (3 m) square closets at their outer end. This provided flexibility of use for the rooms. Two of the inner closets housed servants' stairs. The two ends of the bedroom floor were connected by a balcony supported by columns which may have served the additional purpose of helping support the north side of the cupola.

Built of red brick with Chilmark and Portland stone dressings, the house has a compact, rectangular plan and has two main floors, plus a basement and an attic floor lit by dormer windows. On the south façade, there are eight casement windows in the basement and nine sash windows on each of the ground floor and first floor. The bay with the three central windows projects forwards slightly, and the central ground floor window is pedimented. The lead-covered hipped roof has a central flat section, surrounded by a balustrade with a cupola rising from its centre. The dormer windows are in a central, balustraded terrace of three, with an outlying window on either side. The house is entered from the north through a later mid-19th-century porte-cochère, while to the south there is a stone-flagged terrace with balustrade extending the full width of the building, and broad shallow steps leading down to the lawns. The east façade has a triple-arched loggia with access to the garden, while to the west there is access to the later 18th-century laundry and kitchen garden.

The interiors were influenced by Inigo Jones, but executed by his heir John Webb, a fact confirmed many years later when the National Trust discovered Webb's plans during their formal takeover of the estate. The interiors mostly date from about 1835. The hall has a barrel-vaulted high ceiling with painted decoration and the dining room has panelled walls, tapestries and a decorated plaster ceiling. The library has a ceiling painting attributed to Guido Reni. The staircase is of white marble with turned balusters and a relief frieze, its ornamented ceiling being attributed to Giorgione.

Sited centrally within the 164 hectares (410 acres) grounds, externally the new house was provided with 5 hectares (12 acres) of formal gardens and pleasure grounds; some of these were enclosed by walls, while a series of wide avenues radiated throughout the surrounding 159 hectares (390 acres) of parkland. The house is a Grade I listed building having been so designated on 18 March 1955.

Collections

On display in the house is an important collection of fine art and antiquities built up by many generations of the Bankes family, the core having been assembled by Sir Ralph Bankes in Gray's Inn before the house was built. One of the rooms, the Spanish room (named by reason of the Murillo paintings which hang there), has walls hung with gilded leather. It was recently restored at a cost of several hundred thousand pounds over a 5-year period. Other important collections include paintings of the Bankes family stretching back over 400 years. Other artworks include works by Velázquez, Van Dyck, Titian and Brueghel.

Apart from the Spanish Room, the library is the most atmospheric of rooms, upon the wall of which are hung the huge keys of the destroyed Corfe Castle, handed back to Mary Bankes after her defence of Corfe Castle during the Civil War. The state bedroom is extremely ornate and has housed such important guests as Kaiser Wilhelm II who stayed with the family for a week in 1907. The main staircase is beautifully carved from stone and features three huge statues which look out onto the gardens from their seats. These depict Sir John Bankes and Lady Bankes, the defenders of Corfe Castle, and their patron, Charles I.

Gardens

The land surrounding Kingston Lacy was registered as being of special historic interest in the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens in 1986, it being "parkland developed in the seventeenth, late eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, together with late nineteenth century formal gardens and informal pleasure grounds." The estate comprises about 159 hectares (390 acres) of parkland and other ornamental land and about 5 hectares (12 acres) of gardens. The site slopes gently towards the southwest and includes the summit of the Iron Age hillfort of Badbury Rings towards its northwest extremity, and within the estate is part of the Roman road from Dorchester to Old Sarum.

The estate has two main entrances on Blandford Road, each with a lodge and ornate gateway. The broad drives sweep round to a carriage-turning area by the north façade of the house. The park is mainly pastureland with informal plantings of specimen trees, designed to create pleasant vistas. There are two water features to the northeast of the house.

The formal gardens and pleasure grounds are situated close to the house, with an area of informal pleasure grounds extending to the south-east. Two features are the Cedar Walk and the Lime Walk, both majestic avenues to the south of the house, as well as a plantation known as Blind Wood. There is a terrace in front of the house with urns and vases, overlooking an extensive lawned area. Other features include a Victorian fernery and a sunken garden. To the west of the house, there is a rose garden with a central circular lawn. The kitchen garden lies to the south of the pleasure grounds and is now a commercial nursery. The house and gardens are open to the public and in 2012 received about 230,000 visitors.

Gallery

• 
  Kingston Lacy kitchens, washing rooms and stables
• 
  The house seen from the south west
• 
  The house seen from the gardens
• 
  The east facing side of the house

External links

• Kingston Lacy information at the National Trust
• Kingston Lacy Garden — information on garden history
• Kingston Lacy pictures at Geograph.org