Charles Heathcote Tatham

Charles Heathcote Tatham (8 February 1772 in Westminster, London – 10 April 1842 in London), was an English architect of the early nineteenth century.

He was born in Duke Street, Westminster, the youngest of five sons of Ralph Tatham who had come to London from in County Durham, by his wife Elizabeth Bloxham, the daughter of a well to do hosier in Cateaton Street. The father was first a "Spanish merchant", went bankrupt, became a horse breeder in Essex, went bankrupt again, and was then asked in 1779 by Captain (afterwards Lord) Rodney, whom he had sheltered from his creditors "a great deal of his time" at Havering, if he would like to be his secretary in his command of the Leeward Islands fleet. Ralph Tatham, at 47, rose to the challenge, accepted, and set out for Portsmouth. Unfortunately he fell ill on the way and died of cholera at the Castle & Falcon in Aldersgate Street.

Charles was educated at Louth grammar school in Lincolnshire (Lincs), as was his elder brother Henry, later a gun-maker and sword-cutler by Charing Cross; his eldest brother Thomas became a cabinet maker and "upholsterer to the Prince Regent", his brothers William and John respectively a naval officer and a London solicitor.

Returning to London at the age of 16, he was engaged as a clerk by Samuel Pepys Cockerell, architect and surveyor. Learning nothing there, as he thought, he ran away, and returned to his mother's lodgings, where he remained working hard for a year or more at the five orders of architecture and French ornament and studying mathematics.

When he was nearly 19 Henry Holland, the Prince of Wales's architect in the alterations of Carlton House and the Pavilion, Brighton, received him into his house, and two years later offered him £60 a year for two years to enable him to pursue his studies at Rome. He was introduced to Holland through his relative John Linnell who was in charge of one of London's leading cabinet-maker and upholsterer's firms and a rival to Thomas Chippendale. At Holland's office Tatham designed and drew at large all the ornamental decorations for Drury Lane Theatre. The whole proscenium was marked off from his drawings by Charles Catton the younger, who painted the designs in fresco. The executed design for the boxes in the theatre were by Linnell and they survive at the V&A in the Print Room.

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