Dimbola Lodge

Dimbola Lodge is a pair of mid-19th century houses that were converted into a single residence in 1860 for the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The building is constructed of painted brick, with a slate roof featuring ornate wavy pierced bargeboards and finials to the bracketed verges. Brick axial stacks have corbelled brick tops.

The building’s plan consists of two large, adjacent, two-bay houses joined and remodelled in 1860, with the addition of a central staircase and a porch tower at the centre of the front. It is designed in a Victorian Picturesque style.

The south east front has a 3:1:3 bay arrangement, with gables to the left and right, each featuring a two-story canted bay and a doorway between. The right-hand gable has a semi-circular fanlight above the doorway. Four-pane sash windows are present throughout. The central entrance has a porch tower with double doors, mullion-transom windows, and a moulded cornice. The north east return has four gabled bays, with the central bay projecting and featuring a canted first-floor oriel on brackets. The rear (north west) elevation is gabled with a large canted first-floor bay window supported by braces, with a partly slate-hung service wing on the right.

The interior retains some original Victorian joinery, including the staircase installed by Mrs. Cameron, which has pierced Gothic balusters. There is an elaborate carved wooden chimneypiece in the stairhall, reportedly with Tennyson's initials scratched into it. Mrs. Cameron’s darkroom was formerly the coal-house, which is now part of the living accommodation. Her studio, originally a fowl-house, has been demolished.

Julia Margaret Cameron lived at Dimbola Lodge from 1860 to 1875, and it was here that she produced the majority of her approximately 3000 photographs, portraits of prominent Victorians including Tennyson, Darwin, Herschel, Carlyle, Robert Browning, Lewis Carroll, Alice Liddell, George Du Maurier, Holman Hunt, Charles Kingsley, Longfellow, Ellen Terry, and G.F. Watts. Many other notable figures, such as Thackeray, Lear, Garibaldi, Jennie Lind, Millais, Palgrave, and Sullivan, also visited and stayed at Dimbola Lodge, which was named after her family’s tea plantation in Ceylon.

Dimbola Lodge is of considerable historic interest due to its association with Julia Margaret Cameron and the artistic and literary circle that frequented the house.