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‘So agreeable and suitable a place’: The Character, Use and Provisioning of a Late Eighteenth‐Century Suburban Villa
Author(s) -
Stobart Jon
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
journal for eighteenth‐century studies
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.129
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 1754-0208
pISSN - 1754-0194
DOI - 10.1111/1754-0208.12279
Subject(s) - character (mathematics) , metropolitan area , gateway (web page) , provisioning , property (philosophy) , feature (linguistics) , sociology , history , archaeology , engineering , computer science , telecommunications , world wide web , philosophy , linguistics , geometry , mathematics , epistemology
Suburban villas were an increasingly prominent feature of eighteenth‐century Britain, but they remain largely unexplored outside a few well‐known examples. This article addresses this lacuna through a case study of G rove H ouse in K ensington G ore, the property of the H on. M ary L eigh. By examining the processes of furnishing and maintaining the house, the lifestyle of its owner and the ways in which it drew on and fed into metropolitan systems of supply, it challenges our understanding of the villa as a semi‐rural retreat and argues that, for some at least, it offered a gateway to London society and shopping.