Pope's Villa

Pope's villa was the residence of Alexander Pope at Twickenham, then a village west of London in Middlesex. He moved there in 1719 and created gardens and an underground grotto. The house and grotto were topics of 18th- and 19th-century poetry and art. In about 1845, a neo-Tudor house known as Pope's Villa was built on approximately the same site; it has been used as a school since the early 20th century. Pope's Grotto, which is listed Grade II* by Historic England, survives and is occasionally open to the public.

Alexander Pope moved in 1719 to Twickenham, where many wealthy Londoners had houses. From Thomas Vernon, a local landowner, he leased a piece of land close to the water on a stretch of the River Thames known as Cross Deep; there were two cottages on the site and Vernon added a third. Pope demolished one cottage and part of a second and employed the architect James Gibbs to create a house in Palladian style, which became known as Pope's villa. He had it extended with a portico by William Kent in 1733.

Contemporary drawings and paintings of Pope's villa show a fairly conventional classical 18th-century English country house rather than a faithful reproduction or pastiche of a Palladian villa. The house was on three floors, with a central corps de logis of three bays under a hipped roof, flanked by two lower wings of only one bay each with rooves concealed by a closed parapet. The flanking bays had ashlar quoins. The only decoration to the facade consisted of a pedimented window at the centre of the principal floor, and a stone urn at each termination of the closed parapet. An unusual feature of the facade was at its centre on the ground floor—a large elliptical arch with dominating voussoirs. The arch, flanked by small Florentine Renaissance style windows, is redolent of a water entrance to the portigo of a Venetian palazzo. Bearing in mind the proximity of Pope's Villa to the River Thames, this resemblance is unlikely to be coincidental. The arch, or portal, was contained in a ground projection of the corps de logis which formed the base for the modest portico, more a porch; asked by Pope for his opinion of this renovation, Lord Burlington wrote that "my friend Kent has done all that can be, considering the place".

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