Pleasant lives on 19th Century Crouch Hill for Mr Bankruptcy and the originator of the Regency 'Street View'

As a result of Les G's successful response to an historical image challenge I placed last week, I have been able to uncover not only some of the story of the house pictured in the challenge image, but also parts of the tales of two men and of another house nearby to which they were both linked.

The house that I'd been unable to identify and put out as a challenge turns out to have been the last of the large houses built on what was known in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as Mount Pleasant, at the top of Crouch Hill on the border between the parishes of Hornsey and Islington. Due to the extreme prominence of its position, Mount Pleasant began to attract the attention of wealthy Londoners looking for a spot to build a grand house during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By the middle of the later century, a number of large houses had been built along the ridge either side of Crouch Hill. To the west was Oakfield House: to the east were Mount Pleasant House, Crouch Hill House, Holland House and Womersley House.

1. Extract from 25 inch 1869 Ordnance Survey map with Crouch Hill running south-north through its centre.

Mount Pleasant House, built on a site directly to the south of where Dickenson Road is today, was the home of W. R. Perry, the man who'd had the 'challenge house' built, but I'll come back to him later. Before Perry, Mount Pleasant House had been built by John Tallis, one of the most renowned English cartographic publishers of the 19th century. He and his wife and daughter moved in to their newly completed house in 1855. (Thank you for nudging me to this discovery, Les. I'm a great fan of Tallis's work and it turns out that this nugget about his local connection has been under my nose in a book that's been on my bookshelf for the past ten years, the introductory pages of which, it shames me to say, I've never got round to reading. Lesson learned!).

2. John Tallis at the height of his powers c1858.¹

Mount Pleasant House and its grounds occupied the block of land on which today stand numbers 62-80 Crouch Hill, 2-8 Dickenson Road and all of Ella Road. Sadly, as far as I'm aware, no image survives of the house, but there are a couple of descriptions of it from when it was sold in 1862.

"Mount Pleasant House, situate on the rising ground of Crouch-hill in the pretty rural district of Hornsey - The house possesses considerable architectural attraction, and was built about ten years since by the late proprietor, under his own superintendence, for his own residence. It is just to say that his excellent appreciation of the requirements of a family residence, aided by an ungrudging expenditure, has secured for this establishment all that modern social taste and domestic comfort can require. The grounds have been disposed with great skill and judgment, and the luxuriant shrubs and ornamental trees are yearly adding to their beauty. The hothouses, pinery, stabling, pheasantries, model farm, miniature lake, bowling green, and meadow, have all been studiously arranged for the enjoyment of rural life" (Morning Herald 13 May 1862)

And, from the sale details produced by the selling agent, 

"... built of white Suffolk brick with Portland stone dressings, contains ten rooms including a billiard room and library. The grounds are laid out with lawns, parterres and flower borders with broad gravelled walks winding through trees and shrubs. There is a fruit and vegetable garden, a grapery with prolific vines, and a forcing house and pinery. An enclosed stable yard included stabling for three horses and a double coach house over which is living accommodation for the gardener and the coachman. (Particulars of Sale of Mount Pleasant House".¹

To help run their new home, the Tallises had six resident house servants in addition to a gardener and a coachman.

Some of you may already be familliar with the work of John Tallis. Amongst his best known works are his "London Street Views". I a great fan of these and have been using them in some of my articles for the past five or ten years. First published between 1838 and 1840 and then later in 1847, Tallis's Street Views are essentially a late Regency / early Victorian Google Street View.

4. An example of a page from Tallis Street Views (via Jackson Tallis)

Best known today for this publication, Tallis also produced many finely engraved maps and prints surrounded by decorative borders and 'vignette' scenes. John originally started working in the business when it was still run by his father, also John Tallis - a coincidence of names that has caused much confusion and disagreement about which John was actually responsible for London Street Views. In his authoritative introductory chapters to Tallis's London Street Views, Peter Jackson ascribes most of the credit for the project to the energetic and innovative younger John. Indeed, so much did John the younger put in to the business after his father died, it was taking receipts of c£40,000 a year by 1850,² equivalent to about £7M today.

In 1857 to further expand his thriving publishing empire, Tallis offered to purchase The Illustrated London News, but his offer was rejected. Angered, he set up The Illustrated News of the World in competition.

4. Advertisement for contributors to The Illustrated News of the World, following his acquisition of the title in 1857, (The Globe 26 May 1857).

Most unfortunately for Tallis this new venture proved to be one venture too far and resulted in his bankruptcy in 1861. As a result he had to sell Mount Pleasant House and by 1875 he was apparently reduced to mortgaging his furniture, before dying the following year at the age of 59 as a result of diabetes.³

Shortly after the Tallises vacated Mount Pleasant,  William Robert Perry, his wife and seven children moved in. Like his predecessor, Perry was in the publishing business, albeit in a very different part of the trade. Born in Stoke Newington c1826, he was the oldest child of Thomas Walter Perry.

In the year William was born, Thomas had founded Perry's Gazette, a specialist bankruptcy and insolvency journal that William was to inherit.⁴ William took over the business in the late 1850s following Thomas's death. (What it an ironic coincidence that Perry should move in when he did  - or did he spy the opportunity created by Tallis's bankruptcy in an issue of his paper?)

5. Banner for Perry's newspaper in 1864

In the early 1870s, Perry commissioned the building of the house pictured in The Architect journal that kicked off this short journey of discovery for me.

6. The Burder House on Dikcenson Road (The Architect, March 6 1875)

This imposing house was built on land immediately to east of and adjacent to Mount Pleasant House, land we might assume he already owned, on what became Dickenson Road (The road had started life as Dickenson's Lane, so called apparently after a local land owner, John Dockry Dickenson⁵). Perry chose as architect his son-in-law, Alfred William Newsom Burder who was at the time living with the family at Mount Pleasant. From the publication date of The Architect in Fig. 6, we might assume that it was completed in or before 1875. Perry died shortly after, in July 1876. So it seems possible that his plans for the house were never able to come to fruition. His wife Mary stayed on at Mount Pleasant House, eventually selling up in 1881.

Whilst the Burder house seems to have been built as a residence, I cannot confirm any occupants until about 10 years after it was completed when in 1886 it was taken on by Mrs and Miss Jones as the Carlsruhe College for Young Ladies.

7. Advertisement for Carlsruhe College, Hornsey and Finsbury Park Journal, 13 February 1886.

By the start of the 20th century the house had bought by master tailor John Granville Robeson as a home for himself and his family. Whilst initially they happily adopted the 'Carlsruhe' name for the house, during the first world war the Germanic name was dropped and the house was renamed 'Winderton'.

Robeson died at the house in 1938. Although it went on to survive the war, it fell to the post-war cull of Hornsey's great houses and was demolished and replaced with the block of flats that stands today as 28 Dickenson Road. A further block was built at the end of Winderton's long garden. Today this block fronts on to Mount View Road.

NOTES

1. Sale details prepared by Toplis & Harding, Auctioneers. Tallis Papers, via Jackson, Tallis. 

2. Jackson, Tallis.

3. "The life of John Tallis – Map Maker / Cartographer", Old Maps Library.

4. What started life as Perry’s Bankrupt and Insolvent Gazette became Perry’s Bankrupt Weekly Gazette in 1862, then finally Perry’s Gazette twenty years later.

5. Dickenson later lived in a house by the name of 'Highlands' on Crouch Hill, just to the south of the junction with Mount View Road - Eric A Willats, Streets with a Story: The Book of Islington, Islington Local History Education Trust, 1986. The house, or at least its front wall just about make it into this photo.

SOURCES

Tallis

There are a number of rather scrappy potted histories of Tallis, only some of which seem well researched and of use to the serious historian. By far the best source is one which has been on my bookshelf for the past ten years which I only discovered as I was copying the image for Fig. 4. It turns out that along with 260 pages of reproductions of Tallis's Street View plates, Peter Jackson also wrote an excellent and reassuringly well-sourced 25 page introduction which adds the glue between the elements I'd sourced elsewhere, along with some further nuggets of information. I'd recommend this as by far the best single source on Tallis. Peter Jackson, John Tallis's London Street Views, 1838-1840, London Topographical Society, 2002.

Also:

• The life of John Tallis – Map Maker / Cartographer", on the Old Maps Library website.
• John Adcock, "London Street Views", Yesterday's Papers website, 2011
• "John Tallis, Map and Print Publisher", Antique Print Club website, 2014.

Perry

There is no comprehensive single source on Perry. So, most of the information concerning him came from research using Ancestry and the British Newspaper Aachive. 

• "William Robert Perry", London Remembers website, 2020.
• Perry's Gazette, British Newspaper Archive.

Other

• Eric A Willats, Streets with a Story: The Book of Islington, First published Islington Local History Education Trust, 1986: Digital edition, revised, with additions, Islington Heritage Service 202, for the origin of Dickenson Road.