ACTON PLACE, SITUATED FOUR MILES NORTH-EAST OF SUDBURY, is best remembered for its connection with the Jennens family for whom in the 1720s a substantial house was built but never completed. In 1708 Robert Jennens had acquired Acton Place with an estate of 200 acres from the Daniel family, which had owned two manors in the parish since the first part of the sixteenth century but of whose house no record now remains.

Jennens, who died in 1725/6, was a member of a Midlands family, his father being, reputedly, Humphrey Jennens, a very prosperous Birmingham ironmaker, of Erdington Hall in Warwickshire. Robert Jennens was succeeded by his son, William, who was baptised in 1701 and was a godson of King William III. He lived until 1798. William had an Exchequer annuity of £3,000 a year but lived as if penurious, reputedly occupying three rooms in the basement although the family apartments in the house had been furnished before he succeeded to the estate. It is said that he left £2.5 million, with £19,000 in notes being found in the house on his death and a bank balance of £50,000. Allegedly the richest commoner in England, he died intestate without leaving any record of his family, giving rise to speculation that the Robert Jennens who built Acton Place was neither the son of Humphrey Jennens nor the father of William. Litigation ensued as to the rightful heirs to his estate, but eventually in 1816 Acton Place passed to the Hon. Richard William Penn Curzon who was created Earl Howe in 1821.

‘THE LARGE dwelling house with offices built by Mr Jennings [sic] near Stowmarket’ was designed by James Gibbs but had not been finished by the time of Robert Jennens's death. His son never completed it, the staircase and one wing, which was to have been a ballroom, being left unfinished. The house has been described as ‘magnificent country seat, which for the grandeur of its hall, and the massive elegance of its marble chimney pieces, as well as the beauty of its stables and other offices was totally unrivalled in that part of the country’.

It is depicted in the painting of the entrance front (illustration 1) as having a central block of eleven bays with the two outer sections of two bays each divided by pilasters and the central three bays pedimented.