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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
The destruction of country houses is no new phenomenon. They have not proved as permanent as they seem or we have wished them to be. Some great houses have barely outlived their creators. Those which survived into our own century to be recorded by the camera are comparatively fortunate. Many did not. Cole Green House, built in 1704 by William Cowper, later first Earl Cowper, and demolished by the 5th Earl in 1801, is such a house. In 1970 Lawrence Stone rescued it from oblivion in his essay published in The Country Seat. Since that time a set of three views of c. 1780, showing the house as it appeared not long before its destruction, have been discovered in the National Maritime Museum (Pls 29a and b). The views, part of a large collection of topographical drawings by a John Charnock of Greenwich, provide a far more complete visual record than has been available hitherto. Together with additional, unpublished, material among the Cowper papers, they make possible a fuller account of this important building as well as a more accurate interpretation of existing evidence.
1 Stone, L., ‘Cole Green Park, Hertfordshire’, in The Country Seat, ed. Colvin, H. and Harris, J. (1970), pp. 75–80 Google Scholar.
2 Brushe, John, ‘A Cache of late 18th century topographical drawings in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich’, Hertfordshire Archaeology, 5 (1977), 194-96Google Scholar.
3 Clay, C. G. A., ‘Two Families and their Estates. The Grimstons and the Cowpers from c.1650-c.1815’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge (1966), p. 179 Google Scholar.
4 Hertfordshire Record Office, DEP/P5.
5 Stone, op. cit., pl. 48 and pp. 75-76.
6 Summerson, J., Architecture in Britain 1530-1830 (1970), p. 264 Google Scholar.
7 Vitruvius Britannicus, vol. 11 (1717).
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9 Tipping, H. Avray, English Homes Period IV, vol. 1, Late Stuart 1649-1714 (1920), p. 240 and pl. 511Google Scholar.
10 Compare H. Forrester, The Smaller Queen Anne and Georgian House (1964), fig. 2.
11 Colvin, H. M., A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840 (1978), p. 255 Google Scholar. The City Mason may or may not have been the same as the John Deane of Reading listed by Mr Colvin who was probably the architect of Marlborough Castle, Wiltshire.
12 Gunnis, A Dictionary of British Sculptors, 1660-1851 (1968), p. 123.
13 Gunnis, op. cit., p. 63.
14 Herts. Record Office DEP/F75.
15 Ibid., DEP/F214. (The first inventory is dated November 1723, the other, a check-list, April 1731.)
16 Ibid., DEP/F76.
17 Ibid., DEP/P4.
18 Ibid., DEP/P22.
19 Prince, H., ‘The Changing Landscape at Panshanger’, Transactions of the East Hertfordshire Archaeological Society, XIV (1955-57), 4 Google Scholar.