Hammerwood Park is a country house in Hammerwood, near East Grinstead, in East Sussex, England. It is a Grade I listed building. One of the first houses in England to be built in the Greek Revival architectural style, it was built in 1792 as the first independent work of Benjamin Henry Latrobe. Described by Nikolaus Pevsner as a 'demonstration of primeval force', the house was owned by Led Zeppelin from 1973 until 1982.
History
The site before 1792
The land previously comprised part of a previous estate known as The Bower, probably named after a family called Atte Boure, who are listed as paying tax to Edward I in the 1290s, a substantial landholding which included parts of the parishes of East Grinstead and Hartfield. Sometime during the 1500s the owners, the Botting family, founded an iron forge to the east of the ponds in the valley to the south of the current house (coordinates: ). The forge may have been in existence in 1558, when Hugh Botting left "two tons of yron" in his will; it was working in 1653 but ruined by 1664. The dam has been recorded as long.
In 1693, a part of the woodland adjoining the Ashdown Forest was felled to clear the grounds of the former house on the present site. The estate, which is thought to have been part of a medieval deer park, later passed to other families and in 1766 the owner paid window tax on forty-one windows, making the Bower the fifth largest out of the 150 taxable residences in East Grinstead. It seems likely that the present Bower House, a Tudor farmhouse in the village of Hammerwood, is of no direct relation. There existed a previous building on the site of what was to become Hammerwood Lodge; foundations and walls in the west of the central block of the current house have been dated to pre-1792, and it would seem likely that this was the principal dwelling of the Bower.
1790s: design and construction
In late 1791 or early 1792, John Sperling (1763–1851) is recorded by Christian Ignatius Latrobe as visiting architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe, his brother, in London. Sperling, who already had a country seat at Dynes Hall, a 17th-century country house and 500-acre estate in Great Maplestead, Essex, came from a wealthy family which had made its fortune in the London fur trade after emigrating from Sweden. Only a year older than Latrobe, who was at that time a pupil of S. P. Cockerell, he commissioned Latrobe to design and build a new country house and hunting lodge, in the Germanic tradition of the Jagdschloss, on the site of the Bower. Sperling chose to name the new house Hammerwood Lodge at this point, probably as a romantic reference to the hammer used in the furnace of the iron forge which had existed in the area since the Middle Ages. Latrobe is thought to have supervised the construction from the autumn of 1792 onwards, its proximity to Ashdown House, his second commission (near Forest Row) allowing for the sharing of craftsmen and suppliers of building materials – and for Latrobe to supervise both coincidentally.
Trinder describes the design as comprising "a large, Palladian central block (corps de logis) accentuated by a giant order of shallow pilasters flanked by low arcaded wings terminated in tetrastyle porticoes, while an asymmetric service wing stretches toward the northeast, hidden behind the bulk of the house." Coadeware plaques of scenes derived from the Borghese Vase adorn both porticos, and the influence of the temples at Paestum, which Latrobe may have witnessed on during prior visit to Naples, and Delos has been noted by scholars. Nikolaus Pevsner also observed that the columns were "patently inspired by the then very recent work of such men as Ledoux and Brongniart".
In 1795, due to problems in obtaining payment for another project, Latrobe was faced with severe financial problems. When his wife, Lydia Sellon, having died in childbirth in November 1793, he is thought to have suffered a breakdown. Declared bankrupt and unable to pay some of his workmen, he emigrated to America on 25 November 1795. There is some doubt over whether Hammerwood was finished by this point; it is possible that the Sperlings supervised its completion in Latrobe's absence. However, the failure of a large investment in a Dublin distillery led the Sperlings to lose £70,000 (equivalent to approximately £5.9 million in 2021 pounds); the artist and diarist Joseph Farington reported that they and their partners 'overbuilt themselves at a vast expense'. Between 1798 and 1800, Sperling was compelled to give up both Hammerwood and his London home and to move back to his Dynes Hall estate.