Friday 8 February 2019 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great Victorian, John Ruskin (photographed here in c.1860).
On 8 February 1919 The Graphic published an article remembering the birth of John Ruskin on that day 100 years before.
It talks of the house at 54 Hunter Street just north of Brunswick Square where Ruskin was born and lived with his parents until he was four years old, with its “chocolate cake identification disc”; the forerunner of blue plaques, they were put up by the Society of Arts. The article moves on to 28 Herne Hill, Ruskin’s home through the formative years of his childhood and early youth. The author has some difficulty locating it, which seems surprising because in 1909 the LCC had placed a commemorative plaque in honour of Ruskin on the house. Perhaps the plaque had been removed by a Ruskin enthusiast. The house was unoccupied and probably had been for the previous 12 years, after the lease ran out in 1907. It must have made a sorry sight.
Finally, the article turned to the much grander Ruskin house, bought by Ruskin’s father in 1842, standing in its seven-acre grounds on Denmark Hill, and by this date a private residential hotel.
The Ruskin house on Denmark Hill, seen from the garden side
This house was Ruskin’s home for 29 years until he left London and in 1871, moved to Brantwood on Coniston Water in the Lake District.
Among the many books written by Henry C. Shelley, author of the Graphic article, was The Homes and Haunts of Thomas Carlyle. Carlyle’s Chelsea house was acquired by admirers in 1895. If one puts aside Shakespeare and Milton, whose homes were preserved centuries after their deaths, Carlyle’s house is, I believe, the first example of the home of a celebrated person preserved by contemporary admirers in trust for future generations. Perhaps with this in mind Shelley said of Ruskin’s birthplace: “Is it not possible so to utilise that building as to keep alight therein those lamps of Truth, Beauty, Power, Sacrifice, Obedience, Labour and Memory of which he was the high priest?” He refers of course to the Seven Lamps of Architecture, that heady Ruskinian mix of scholarship, highly personal aesthetics and morality first published in 1849 and which, through many editions, came to have an influence on so much that was built in England in the second half of the 19th century. It was one that Ruskin came to regret bitterly. The rural South London outskirts that Ruskin knew and loved in his youth disappeared beneath the work of the speculative builder, rows of brick villas and terraces with their garnish of porches and pediments often loosely derived from the Venetian Gothic. In 1872 Ruskin wrote: “One of my principal notions for leaving my present house [on Denmark Hill] is that it is surrounded everywhere by accursed Frankenstein monsters of, indirectly, my own making”. It is right that South London had begun to change by this date, but it would be another 20 or so years before the immediate surroundings of Herne Hill and Denmark Hill truly changed out of all recognition.
Preservation of the house at Hunter Street was not to be, though it took as long as 1969 before it was demolished, part of the later stages of the widespread destruction of Georgian Bloomsbury. One might have expected its demise to be remarked upon in the pages of The Times, but it passed unmourned. When the Denmark Hill house disappeared in 1947 a writer to that newspaper had lamented: “In June it was still a guest house: now it has gone, vanished! Of the estate with the wonderful view to Shooter’s Hill, nothing remains but broken ground, littered with tree-boughs and rubbish. New roads are being laid across the descent to Green Lane, also along the adjoining property to the modern Sunray Avenue. Notice boards announce ‘Borough of Camberwell Housing Site’”. It is hard today to imagine the land as the pasture for three cows that Ruskin and his parents kept, “skimming our own cream and churning our own butter”, or the “porter’s lodge, where undesirable visitors could be stopped before startling us with a knock”. And Ruskin added: “But though we had many happy days in the Denmark Hill house, none of our new ways ever were the same to us as the old: the basketfuls of peaches had not the flavour of the numbered dozen or score, nor were all the apples of the great orchard worth a single dishful of the Siberian crabs of Herne Hill”.
No. 28 Herne Hill was one of a pair of semi-detached houses built about 1810.
The two houses occupied a plot that today accommodates four houses, Nos. 26– 32, between Dorchester Court and the Quadrangle. Where the latter now stands was a matching pair of houses. One must imagine the Ruskin house set back more than twice the distance of the houses on the site today. Ruskin’s mother enjoyed tending lilacs and laburnums in the spacious front garden. But it was the gently sloping garden at the back, some 200 feet long, that her son remembered with most emotion. He recalled “the strong old mulberry tree, a tall white-heart cherry tree, a black Kentish one, and an almost unbroken hedge, all round, of alternate gooseberry and currant bush; decked, in due season, with magical splendour of abundant fruit; fresh green, soft amber, and rough-bristled crimson bending the spinous branches; clustered pearl and pendant ruby joyfully discoverable under the large leaves that looked like a vine”.
The garden at 28 Herne Hill, watercolour by Emily Warren in Homes and Haunts of John Ruskin by E.T. Cook (1912)
The Herne Hill garden exercised a profound influence on Ruskin. One notices not only his intense sensitivity to colour and form — he was a fine artist himself — but also his deep love of nature, a recurring theme in his writing. It is justly claimed that Ruskin was an important forerunner of the environmental movement of our own times.
John Ruskin: Study of Rocks in the Alps
The house at 28 Herne Hill was the first of the three Ruskin homes in London to go, in the early 1920s. A few weeks before war broke out in 1914 there were press reports of the house in the hands of the housebreakers with the attic story removed. The Globe wrote: “No one has thought it worthwhile to save it. It is to be pulled down to provide building material for the building of a block of flats for bachelor girls. A road is to be driven through the garden at the back, and all trace of the house and grounds which Ruskin described so lovingly in Praeterita and Fors Clavigera will soon have disappeared”.
The attic room had the best views. Ruskin recalled “the Norwood hills on one side, and the winter sunrise over them; and the valley of the Thames on the other, with Windsor telescopically clear in the distance, and Harrow, conspicuous always in fine weather to open vision against the summer sunset”. This room was Ruskin’s nursery as a child, then his bedroom and later the room he often used when visiting London, after he had settled at Brantwood and given the Herne Hill house to his cousin Joan Severn. Those views from Herne Hill were the basis of the strong affinity that Ruskin found with Turner, surely the greatest painter of skies and atmospheric effects in English art.
The First World War delayed the demolition, but by 1925 the house was gone. In the front garden of what is today No. 26 is a plaque on a post placed by the LCC in 1925 recording the fact that John Ruskin lived in a house on the site. That is the only reminder, unless a length of old brick wall in the lane that runs down to the derelict garages at the side of Dorchester Court could be attributed as part of the garden wall of the Ruskin house.
Sadly, this seems unlikely, because careful overlay of an old map on the current topography shows the line of the old wall as the boundary of the large house that stood where Dorchester Court now stands and abutting a lane that divided that house from the Ruskin house.
After Ruskin’s death his reputation suffered a period of decline. The Victorian era was over. The concept of the great man, the “hero” promulgated by Thomas Carlyle, was out of favour. And it was difficult to place Ruskin — was he an art critic, a social radical, a maverick reactionary, a writer too ready to sound off at length about almost any subject? It is therefore not surprising that, apart from local place names, all physical trace of Ruskin has been erased from Herne Hill. But one would like to think the animus loci remains; it did so much to shape the thinking of the man, and that thinking is preserved in what is, at its best, some of the finest writing in English literature.
Portrait by Thomas Blake Wirgman (National Portrait Gallery). Ruskin sat for the portrait in February 1884 at Herne Hill, with a second sitting at the studio of Edward Burne-Jones. It shows the interior of the attic room at 28 Herne Hill that he used on visits to London. An engraving of the portrait was published in The Graphic on 3 April 1886.
Laurence Marsh
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