Langdon Abbey

Langdon Abbey is a house incorporating elements from the 12th, 16th, and late 17th centuries, with alterations made in the mid-19th century. It was built for the Thornhill family on the site of a former Premonstratensian Abbey. The main fabric is red brick in irregular Flemish, stretcher, and English bond, with flint and dressed stone sections to the rear, all beneath a plain tiled roof.

The entrance front, dating to the late 17th century, is two storeys with a basement. It is characterised by a plinth, plat band, and boxed eaves to a hipped roof, with stacks positioned to the left, centre left, and right. The windows are largely 19th-century, arranged regularly on the right-hand side of the elevation. This includes two tripartite sashes and a central segmentally headed sash to the upper floor, and two tripartite sashes with a central six-panel door with a semi-circular fanlight in a rendered rusticated surround on the ground floor. The left-hand portion has a single sash window on each floor, set within blocked larger window openings, and a four-panel door with a simple architrave. Four segmentally headed basement openings are also visible.

The rear elevation is a two-storey hipped structure in English bond, featuring a distinctive brick arcading of giant pilasters extending across the facade and a projecting wing. A main wing displays keyed and blocked arches on the ground floor, now filled in to create a three-bay portico effect; an unusual example of the East Kent Artisan Mannerist vocabulary. A one-storey extension of galleted stone blocks projects from the left-hand wing, with a return wall rebuilt in 18th-century brickwork.

Internally, the rear wings include large scantling joists, chamfered and stopped with quirk and tongue. There are also fitted cupboards and doors with raised and fielded panelling, the majority of which date from the mid-19th century.

The cellars incorporate the undercroft of the 12th-century abbey’s cellarium, including a barrel-vaulted slype with finely gauged chalk webbing. The main range is set at right angles to the slype, with surviving springers for groin vaults and chamfered arched and round-headed stone doorways. A domed bread oven from the 18th century remains in the stone end wing.

Langdon Abbey was founded between 1189 and 1192 by William d'Auberville of Westernhanger, intended for white canons from Leyston, Suffolk. Dedicated to St. Mary and St. Thomas the Martyr, the Abbey had an uneventful history until its dissolution in 1535. A house was subsequently built by Samuel Thornhill after 1590, extended by his successors until 1700, and then sold to the Waldershare estate. The remains of the church and conventual buildings, which lay to the east of the house, were excavated and back covered in 1882 by Sir William St. John Hope.