Cannons (house)

Cannons
James Gibb's design for the South Front (from Vitruvius Britannicus)
General information
Architectural style	English Baroque
Town or city	Little Stanmore
Country	England
Construction started	1713
Completed	1724
Demolished	1747
Cost	£200,000
Client	James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos
Technical details
Structural system	stone
Design and construction
Architect	William Talman, John James, James Gibbs, John Price and Edward Shepard

Cannons was a stately home in Little Stanmore, Middlesex, built by James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos, between 1713 and 1724 at a cost of £200,000 (equivalent to £28,130,000 today) but which in 1747 was razed and its contents dispersed.

The name "Cannons" is an obsolete spelling of "canons" and refers to the Augustinian canons of St Bartholomew's Hospital, London, which owned the estate before the English Reformation.

Cannons was the focus of the first Duke's artistic patronage – patronage which led to his nickname "The Apollo of the Arts". Brydges filled Cannons with Old Masters and Grand Tour acquisitions, and also appointed Handel as resident house composer from 1717 to 1718. Such was the fame of Cannons that members of the public flocked to visit the estate in great numbers and Alexander Pope was unjustly accused of having represented the house as "Timon's Villa" in his Epistle Of Taste (1731).

The Cannons estate was acquired by Chandos in 1713 from the uncle of his first wife, Mary Lake. Mary's great-grandfather Sir Thomas Lake had acquired the manor of Great Stanmore in 1604. Following the first Duke's death in 1744, Cannons passed to his son Henry Brydges, 2nd Duke of Chandos. Due to the cost of building Cannons and significant losses to the family fortune in the South Sea Bubble there was little liquid capital in Henry's inheritance, so in 1747 he held a twelve-day demolition sale at Cannons which saw both the contents and the very structure of the house itself sold piecemeal leaving little more than a ruin barely thirty years after its inception. The subsequent villa built by William Hallett is now occupied by North London Collegiate School.