Friends and family, back in the 1970s, would often aggravate each other with a lengthy holiday slideshow, presenting a string of identical beach views and nameless hillside vistas over the course of a dull evening. Today, there is a new phrase that can freeze the heart just as easily as the sight of a slide projector, and it is: “I’ve done some research into my family history and you’ll never guess what I’ve found out!” A scroll bearing a family tree unrolls to reveal a roster of Jacks and Noreens, leading back to some Charleses and Marys, each perching on ever-more-distant branches and ultimately signifying little about the people who are actually living and breathing around you.
For me, this became a domestic issue a while ago, because my husband, a history buff, takes genealogy quite seriously. To be fair, he was early to spot the wider growing public interest in family history as a hobby, even before the genetic element had truly taken hold with the arrival of rival commercial DNA-tracing services.
But the big embarrassment for me is that I have finally been sucked in. I recently discovered something surprising enough – funny enough, even – about one of my own antecedents that the last laugh is on me. One evening this year, in an attempt to engage my interest, I was shown documentary proof that my paternal grandfather – who I always knew had grown up above Thorpe’s, a tobacconists and newsagents on Roman Road in east London – was immediately descended from a Fleet Street barber. This unexpected bulletin from the past did cause perhaps one of my eyebrows to rise a little, given the gruesome legend of Sweeney Todd, the fabled “demon barber” said to have operated so fatally from that London street. Mildly interesting.
But it was the next revelation about my specific line of Thorpes that can genuinely make people sit up straight for a bit, or at least cause them to blink. It seems my direct ancestor, an eminent Elizabethan designer and surveyor called John Thorpe, is the man credited with inventing the corridor. Yes, the corridor. Not the windowsill or the drainpipe, but the corridor.
Until John Thorpe, rooms in the great houses of England used to lead on, one from another, all grouped around a central entrance hall, and while some buildings had monastery-style external covered cloisters bordering central courtyards, these were always too nippy for a northern climate. Roman villas in Britain, it’s true, had also sported mediterranean colonnades, open on one side, but it took John Thorpe of King’s Cliffe, Northamptonshire, to popularise the idea of an internal corridor – and then, so to speak, to run with it.
Thorpe, born around 1565, was one of a succession of stonemasons and builders who worked in the Northamptonshire area from the late 1500s and he is, luckily for me, now the subject of renewed academic interest. He was the descendant of three generations of builders, all called Thomas Thorpe, and his grandfather and father were both stonemasons. But at 20, John set off for London, gaining work as a surveyor’s clerk to Queen Elizabeth I and eventually becoming the top guy at court in his field.
The real testament to his talent is the album of original drawings he put together, now a prized possession of Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe contains 295 drawings, made mainly between the 1590s and the 1620s and covering 168, largely English, buildings. Even as an amateur, Thorpe’s architectural significance was clearly apparent in his painstaking surveys and sketches of the major private homes of the era, including some that are mere blueprints of houses he hoped to be commissioned to build.
So important is Thorpe’s architectural reputation that his statue is up among the firmament of design stars that decorates the outside of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Kensington. There Thorpe still stands, clutching his roll of drawings and dressed in doublet, hose and a fetching hat. And for Dr Manolo Guerci, the chief current scholar of Thorpe’s work, he is a man who ought to be held in as much esteem nowadays as Sir Christopher Wren, designer of St Paul’s Cathedral, or Thorpe’s famous contemporary, Inigo Jones.
“You can’t overstate the importance of the Thorpe album at the Soane, nor the broader understanding of the period it gives. Not until Wren do we find a similar range of skills brought to bear,” Guerci told me over coffee this autumn, adding, “It is really rather strange to finally meet someone with the surname so constantly in my head!”
An earlier catalogue of Thorpe’s album was made in the 1960s by Sir John Summerson, a celebrated former curator of the Soane. He judged it then as “perhaps the most important relic in existence of architectural drawings and designs in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I”. Guerci, a reader in architecture at the University of Kent, explained to me that this rare book, which I have since held gingerly in my own arms, is in fact one of only two such surviving groups of drawings. The other is the Smythson Collection kept at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
But crucially, says Guerci, it was Thorpe who first imagined the grand stately home as we know it. He set a template for English country living that went out around the world. “Thorpe’s relevance within a defining moment in British architecture is paramount,” Guerci writes on the Soane website. “The period sees the establishment of what we might call a truly English style, characterised by an eclectic and highly experimental mixture of vernacular and continental features, so splendidly expressed, for instance, by the likes of Wollaton Hall (1580s), Nottinghamshire, or indeed in one of Thorpe’s plans for his own house, devised as “IT”, after his (Latin) initials.”
Guerci’s 2021 book about London’s original Golden Mile, The Great Houses of the Strand, published by Yale University Press, also shows how Thorpe’s aesthetic shaped the look of central London, at least before the Great Fire of 1666. But there are many unanswered questions that still drive Guerci’s researches. Among them is the issue of which designs are original Thorpes, and which sketches were made simply for his own amusement, rather than being formally commissioned.
The Midlands left far behind him, Thorpe rubbed shoulders with famous Elizabethans such as Sir Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex. Proximity with him is particularly pleasing, since my father, now 89, has always admired this historic figure.
And there are other coincidences that now seem especially fitting, despite this being exactly the kind of “after-the-fact” reasoning I used to scorn. Can it be just chance, for instance, that when I visited the English Heritage-owned remains of Kirby Hall near Corby a couple of years ago I was so impressed with the place? It turns out this building was one of the first my ancestor had had a hand in. He wrote that he “layd ye first stone” as a young boy in 1570, as his father constructed the great house.
Leafing through the original drawings in the archive at the Soane, it is evident that John Thorpe travelled across Britain to make a visual record of the homes of many noblemen, before going on to develop the look of the Strand and then sketch important buildings in European cities. His drawing of Westminster Abbey notably includes a little representation of the skeleton of Queen Elizabeth lying in her tomb. The Thorpe family motto, it seems, was the obscure Latin phrase Supervidens non videns, which means something like “the overseer does not see” – implying, perhaps, that it takes the eye of another to truly appreciate possessions or property.
A memorial plaque at King’s Cliffe’s village church promised further information, so I visited in the autumn. Pushing open the wooden door, I found the aftermath of a harvest festival celebration in full swing. Members of the friendly congregation showed me to a half-hidden carved stone, high up on the wall of the entrance to the north transept.
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At the top was my family crest, three crescent moons around a star, above a list of sons and fathers. This stone is not the only mark the Thorpes left on the village. “If you go up Park Street, it’s up on the left,” I was told. Sure enough, there stands the Thorpe almshouses, bequeathed to King’s Cliffe on John Thorpe’s death in London in 1654, and now converted into a charming, wonky cottage. It once bore another stone plaque, set on the front gable. Translated from Latin its inscription read:
“Charity built me
The poor will live here
Honesty will enhance it
It will last for all time.
By the gift of John Thorpe,
Gentleman, 1668.”
Next month, Guerci is to deliver a paper on John Thorpe with the title Re-tackling the beast: The Book of Architecture of John Thorpe in Sir John Soane’s Museum, at London’s Society of Antiquaries during the New Insights Conference. He also has plans for a virtual exhibition on the Soane site in the coming year, co-curated with RIBA’s expert, on the theme of “Drawing buildings: observation, invention and the architect in Early Modern England”.
My own researches have made me wonder whether the invention of something as basic as a corridor might ever have been patented. Am I secretly heir to the corridor fortune? An expert has informed me, sadly, that Thorpe’s innovations came just too early for the Patent Office.
Comfortingly, though, I was told the corridor was just the kind of solution to a technical problem that would later have merited legal status, its chief advantage being the way it let servants pop in and out of rooms without disturbing the grandees gliding from one salon to another.
There may be no chance of gaining anything more than an insight into the past from my discovery. But this, I now admit, is the real appeal of family history.
Alex Graham, creator of the monumentally successful BBC show Who Do You Think You Are?, confesses he was also a sceptic at first. “I wish I could say I had faith in the project, but the truth is, while I knew it was a smart way to do history, its ability to unlock emotion, not just in the participants but in the audience, took me by surprise. And if you’d told me it would still be on TV 20 years later…!” he said.
The powerful connections people feel towards ancestors they never knew still strikes him as remarkable. “I don’t think it can be genetic in any simplistic sense. My best guess is that the rise of genealogy has coincided with a decline in conventional religion, which traditionally helped to give us a sense of where we came from and who we are.” Graham also suggests that the accompanying loosening of family bonds may have “created emotional gaps which genealogy has helped to fill”.
Personally, although I honestly do realise the 12-generation chain that connects me to John Thorpe doesn’t enhance my status one iota, there is an illogical sense of pride. It also amuses me to recall that, as a little girl, I used to sit down with a pack of felt-tip pens and repeatedly draw blueprints for the striking rural homes I hoped one day to live in.