The Mausoleum To The Hope Family

The Mausoleum to the Hope Family

This is a mausoleum built in 1818 in the Greek Revival style for Thomas Hope (1769-1831), the eminent art collector, connoisseur and promoter of the Neo-Classical style. It was probably designed by the architect William Atkinson (1774/5-1839), with significant contributions from Hope himself. No original architect's plans or contemporary images have been discovered.

The building is constructed of ashlar with retaining walls of rendered brickwork and decorative ironwork. Its plan is rectangular, comprising a rectangular railed courtyard with projecting side retaining walls leading to the mausoleum itself. The mausoleum has a rectangular antechamber leading to a larger square burial chamber built into the hillside.

The south-east or entrance front of the antechamber is single storeyed with a plain pediment (the corner pieces and stone coping missing at the time of inspection). The walls have a moulded cornice and are battered towards the base. There is a central round-headed arched entrance. The entrance was sealed in 1957 with bricks and external render, but early-twentieth-century photographs show cast iron gates with a fishscale pattern to the fanlight and double doors with square panels decorated with patterns of intersecting diagonals. Adjoining on each side were two projecting retaining walls of rendered brick and a parapet with stone coping, stepped down at the front. These were linked to a low courtyard wall with ornamental cast iron railings featuring a pattern of intersecting diagonals to square panels, slender iron gatepiers with pyramidal tops, and double gates with similar panels.

The interior antechamber has oak double doors with brass handles (believed to be still in place) leading to the burial chamber. The burial chamber is vaulted in ashlar with giant ribbed round-headed arches. There are 33 loculi (recesses for coffins) arranged in three tiers on three sides, each terminating in two plain cast iron rings.

In 1807 Thomas Hope had purchased The Deepdene, Dorking, as his country residence. In 1814 the estate was enlarged when Hope's brother bought the adjoining estate, Chart Park, for £30,000 and presented it to him. In 1817 tragedy struck when Hope's youngest son Charles died of a fever in Rome during a family tour of Italy, aged seven. On returning to England the following year, Hope built the mausoleum on the edge of Chart Park over the burial place of Charles' ashes. In the same year, 1818, Thomas Hope commissioned William Atkinson to execute additions of his own design in Neo-Classical style to the Deepdene. Thomas Hope died on 2nd February 1831 in London and was buried ten days later in the family mausoleum in accordance with his wishes that his body 'be deposited in the quietest manner next to that of my ever lamented son Charles'.

The estate was inherited by Hope's eldest son Henry Thomas, who made extensive alterations to the Deepdene, completed around 1840, and enlarged the estate. He was buried in the mausoleum in 1862.

The Hope Mausoleum first appears on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1869 and appears on the 1896 and 1914 editions without any changes. Thomas Hope's great-grandson and eventual heir, Lord Francis Pelham Hope (8th Duke of Newcastle), ran up enormous debts forcing him to sell the contents of the Deepdene in 1917. By 1920 the estate was divided and sold with much of the parkland developed for residential use. The last interment in the mausoleum was of the 8th Duke of Newcastle, buried here in 1941, by which time nine of the thirty-three loculi were filled by members of the Hope family.

The mausoleum was listed Grade II in 1951. In 1957, following repeated attempts by vandals to break into the structure, the doorway was permanently sealed with bricks and cement render and the roof was strengthened with a three-inch-thick cement render. In 1960 the mausoleum and about one and a half acres of surrounding land were donated to Mole Valley Urban District for the benefit of the public. Between 1960 and 1973 the mausoleum was buried, though the surroundings were not turned into a garden as had been proposed. In June 2009 part of the top of the south-east front of the mausoleum was uncovered.