At Sutton House

Next tickets available for my walking tour on Sunday 21st August

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I love to visit dark old houses on bright summer days. There is something delicious about stepping from the heat of the day into the cool of the interior, almost as if the transition from one temperature to another was that of time travel, from the present into another era.

I wonder if this notion is a residue of my childhood, when my parents took me on summer trips to visit stately homes, so that now I associate these charismatically crumbling old piles of architecture with warm English afternoons.

Such were my feelings when visiting Sutton House, the oldest house in the East End, recently. It made me think of the country mansions of city burghers that once filled Spitalfields before the streets were laid out and the terraces built up.

Built between 1534-5 by Ralph Sadleir, an associate of Thomas Cromwell, Sutton House employed oak beams from the royal forest of Enfield given to Cromwell by Henry VIII. In 1550, Sadleir sold his house to John Machell who became Sheriff Of London, acquiring wealth as a City merchant. Overreaching himself in debt, the house was repossessed by Sir James Deane, a money-lender.

By 1627, it was in the ownership of Captain John Milward, a silk merchant and member of the East India Company, who furnished it with oriental carpets and commissioned elaborate strapwork murals upon the staircase that survive in fragments to this day.

Sarah Freeman leased the house in 1657 for a girls’ school which ran for nearly a century until it was divided into two dwellings in the mid-eighteenth century, Ivy House and Milford House. Only at the end of the nineteenth century were the two halves reunited when Canon Evelyn Gardner created St John’s Institute as a recreational club for ‘men of all classes.’ Within ten years the building was condemned as unsafe, but thanks to a public appeal which raised £3000 it was extensively renovated with additions in the Arts & Crafts style.

After the Institute left, a failed attempt was made to buy Sutton House for the nation before the National Trust stepped in to save it in 1938. For decades, rooms were let as offices to voluntary organisations until squatters occupied the house in the eighties. Then developers were prevented from converting it into luxury flats by a successful local campaign to Save Sutton House which eventually opened to the public in 1991.

Thus history passed through Sutton House like a whirlwind yet, despite all the changes, the atmosphere of past ages still lingers, especially in the shadowy panelled rooms that enfold the overwhelming mystery of numberless untold stories.