Dartington, Devon: Henry Moore ‘Memorial Figure’, Dartington Church and Hall

Dartington Hall, north of Totnes in Devon, celebrates its centenary as a community in 2025.  It’s a magical place, where people of talent have created, educated and influenced life and culture in Britain and beyond in all manner of fascinating ways.

It grew from the vision of Leonard Elmhirst (1893-1974) and his wife Dorothy (1887-1968), who purchased the decrepit estate, with its grand house dating back to 1338, to found a charity dedicated to encouraging all forms of art, sustainable agriculture, social science and peace.

Dorothy Elmhirst belonged to the Whitney family, which had settled in Massachusetts in the seventeenth century and became fabulously wealthy after Eli Whitney (1765-1825) invented the cotton gin, transforming the economy of the slave-based cotton industry in the Southern states.  She inherited $15 million dollars at the age of seventeen.  She and her husband wanted for nothing, and sincerely wanted to make the world a better place.

Leonard was descended from a long line of Yorkshire gentry.  After service in the First World War and subsequent study in the USA, he met the Bengali poet, artist, social reformer and Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and followed him to India as his secretary.  Together they founded an Institute of Rural Reconstruction in West Bengal.

When Leonard and Dorothy married in 1925, Tagore, who had travelled extensively in England, encouraged them to invest in the ideas of the Chinese-based Rural Reconstruction Movement and may have suggested Dartington Manor as a suitable site.

The Elmhirsts lost no time in improving the estate, employing the architect William Weir (1865-1950) to restore and adapt the existing buildings, including the Great Hall which had stood roofless for over a century.  Dorothy Elmhirst worked with the garden designers Beatrix Farrand and Percy Cane to transform the gardens.

The weaver Elizabeth Peacock created the wall-hangings for the Great Hall between 1930 and 1938.  The architect Walter Gropius adapted the interior of the Barn Theatre in 1935, in preparation for Michael Chekhov, nephew of the playwright Anton, to start the Dartington Theatre School the following year.  The Henry Moore sculpture ‘Memorial Figure’ was installed in the grounds in 1947.

A cluster of practical and educational projects grew up and were placed under an umbrella organisation, the Dartington Hall Trust, in 1935.  All of them have adapted over the years, and some have closed down or moved away – the progressive Dartington Hall School (1926), the Dartington Hall Film Unit (1945), the Dartington International Summer School and music festival (1953), the Dartington College of Arts (1961), Dartington Glass (1967;  divested and renamed Dartington Crystal 1986) and the ecology-focused Schumacher College (1990).

The roll-call of prominent artists and innovators associated with Dartington is remarkable, beginning with Rabindranath Tagore’s initial visit in 1926.  Paul Robeson rehearsed his 1930 production of Othello at Dartington.  The potter Bernard Leach was involved in Dartington from its earliest days and taught there from 1932.  The influential dancer and teacher Rudolf von Laban arrived from Nazi Germany in 1938 and contributed to Dartington programmes until 1951.

The composer Imogen Holst, daughter of Gustav, taught at summer schools between 1942 and 1951.  Benjamin Britten conducted his cantata St Nicolas in the Great Hall in 1949, the year after it was completed, and Igor Stravinsky visited the 1957 Summer School.

One of the most influential figures associated with Dartington was the sociologist and writer Michael Young, latterly Baron Young of Dartington, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old pupil at the School in 1929, was a Trustee for fifty years, 1942-1992, and wrote the history of the Trust, entitled The Elmhirsts of Dartington: the creation of an utopian community (1982).

The Dartington estate is a delightful place to visit, whether for a few hours or a few days, either to attend an event or simply be there:  Visit Dartington Trust: events, courses, walks, food and drink & more.

Just as Sir John Soane’s Moggerhanger Park has been restored after twentieth-century alterations, so his own country seat, Pitzhanger Manor, has been returned to a state that its architect and first occupant would recognise.

By 1800 Soane had established his career:  he was appointed architect and surveyor to the Bank of England in 1788 and clerk of works for St James’s Palace and the Palace of Westminster in 1791, and purchased and rebuilt the town house at 12 Lincoln’s Inn Fields that now forms part of the Sir John Soane Museum in 1792.

Though Lincoln’s Inn Fields was ideal for conducting his busy architectural practice he sought a convenient country retreat where he could entertain clients as well as friends.  He purchased a house called Payton Place, which he renamed Pitzhanger Manor, in Ealing on the London-to-Oxford turnpike that provided easy access to and from the capital.

The village of Ealing was becoming fashionable:  Soane’s neighbours at the start of the new century included HRH Prince Edward (1767-1820), newly-created Duke of Kent and Strathearn, and Spencer Perceval (1762-1812), remembered as the only British prime minister to have been assassinated.

Soane had first encountered the Payton Place building in the late 1760s:  he worked on the south wing when he was apprenticed to the architect George Dance the Younger (1741-1825).

He bought the property for £4,500 and demolished all but Dance’s south wing, replacing it with his own design, completed in 1804.  Soane and his family lived there only until 1810:  he became estranged from his two ne’er-do-well sons and his wife Eliza preferred to live in town.  At Lincoln’s Inn Fields he purchased and rebuilt the adjacent houses, 13 and 14 which, with No 12, now form the Museum.

The three-bay centrepiece of Pitzhanger Manor echoes Robert Adam’s south front at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire, and is derived from the triumphal Arch of Constantine in Rome.  Whereas earlier eighteenth-century architects had used ashlar or stucco to set the tone of their exteriors, Soane here contrasted brick and Portland stone, and stretched the narrow façade with a lofty attic.  The buildings bristles with statues and medallions of Coade stone, the twice-fired hard-wearing artificial ceramic that was prevalent from the early 1770s to the late 1840s in London and elsewhere in the British Isles and overseas.

Pitzhanger Manor is rather like Tardis:  it seems bigger inside than its exterior suggests.  This is because Soane retained the Dance wing to the south and his service buildings to the north were replaced in 1901-02 when the house became Ealing’s public library.

Like Moggerhanger Park, unsympathetic institutional use allowed a practical restoration. 

From 1985 until 2019, in gradual stages, the London Borough of Ealing and the Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery Trust have transformed the place into a sympathetic restoration of the historic house, with the library wing adapted as an excellent modern art gallery.  On the site of the former walled kitchen garden stands Soane’s Kitchen, an attractive modern café-restaurant:  Pitzhanger » Eat & Drink.

For details of opening times and events at Pitzhanger House, visit Pitzhanger » Current Events.