J H Buckingham - Sopwell Ruins

Social History (Museum of St Albans)

1981.3873

Unsigned. Watercolour painting with pencil showing "Sopwell Ruins & Mr John Day 1850" (see handwritten caption in pencil top right). The scene shows what appears to be a farm building with figures working including a man on top of a ladder working on the thatched roof of the smaller building to the right. In the distance Sopwell Ruins are visible. Pencil sketch on verso. of an old cottage near the pre, St Albans (PX5427). These are not the ruins of Sopwell Nunnery, but the remains of a house built on that site by Sir Richard Lee, who was Henry VIII’s military surveyor and a very wealthy man. He was granted the nunnery and its lands after the Dissolution. Queen Elizabeth I stayed there in 1564. The house is built of brick and flint and Totternhoe clunch, a soft local chalky stone, probably recycled from the nunnery buildings. Old London Road and Sopwell Lane became the main route to London when Sir Richard diverted the original road which passed too close to his house. In the late 17th century the house was sold to the Grimston family who by then owned Gorhambury, and they used materials from the house for building works at Gorhambury.

1850

PX5426Buck.tif

Amy Cooke

3) MoStA Archive Room

St Albans, Hertfordshire, UK.

PWD Box 43

12/05/2006