Northampton House
Names
- Northampton House
- Manor House
- Mad House
- Manor House School
Street/Area/District
- St. John's Street
Maps & Views
Descriptions
from Survey of London: Volume 46, South and East Clerkenwell, ed. Philip Temple (London County Council; British History Online) (2008)
Northampton House (demolished)
Soon after the Restoration, certainly by 1666, James Compton, 3rd Earl of Northampton, built himself a fashionably Dutch-looking brick lodge on Woods Close (Ill. 411). Set back from St John Street at the end of a drive, it was on the site now occupied by the former vicarage to the Martyrs' Memorial Church, No. 14 Wyclif Street. Usually called Northampton House, but also known as the 'manor house', it was a secondary London residence for the earl and not long used by the family; the 4th Earl abandoned it by c. 1700, in favour of Bloomsbury Square.
Unfashionably located in a fairly isolated spot on the periphery of London, it was then adapted for use as a 'mad house' by Dr James Newton. He and his son, also James, both botanists as well as physicians, laid out the grounds as a botanic garden while managing the asylum up to 1750. The institution later came under the control of Dr John Monro, physician to Bethlem and Bridewell hospitals. His son, Dr Thomas Monro, who was a patron of many watercolourists, admitted the landscape artist John Robert Cozens, who died there in 1797. With development of the surrounding field under way in 1802, the establishment closed and the building was 'substantially' refurbished by Thomas Woollcott, who in 1804 took a long lease of the house and its remaining grounds to the west and south. From 1817 it was a ladies' boarding school, then in the 1850s the 'Manor House School' for boys. The property was acquired in the 1870s for the building of the Martyrs' Memorial Church, the house itself being demolished in 1874 to make way for the vicarage.4