A manuscript estate map drawn on VELLUM of Place House, Little Ealing in Middlesex. ‘PLACE HOUSE, Little Ealing Lane, was reputedly sequestrated as recusants’ property during the Interregnum and had nine hearths in 1664. It belonged to John Loving (d. 1693) and descended to his son and namesake, who successfully asserted his claim to a pew in Ealing church and his independence of Coldhall manor in 1693. In 1729 Loving sold the house to Sir Richard Ellis, Bt. (d. 1742), whose widow Sarah sold 33 acre of copyhold to King Gould before her marriage in 1745 to Sir Francis Dashwood, Bt., later Lord Le Despenser (d. 1781). The Dashwoods either sold the house or let it on a 1,000-year lease in 1746 to Richard, later Sir Richard, Lyttelton, who in 1760 with his wife Rachel, dowager duchess of Bridgwater, assigned the lease to Francis Greville, Earl Brooke and Earl of Warwick (d. 1773), who assigned it in 1765 to Lord James Manners. In 1765 and 1777 the tenant of at least part of the estate was the statesman Thomas Thynne, Viscount Weymouth and later Marquess of Bath (1734-96). Manners sold the estate in 1789 to Cuthbert Fisher, whose widow was owner in 1811, when the estate had been renamed EALING PARK. Mrs. Fisher was succeeded by 1824 by her husband’s devisee Jacob Jeddere, who took the name Fisher and had died by 1834. In 1840 Ealing Park belonged to the surgeon William Lawrence, later a baronet (1783-1867), whose 89 acre estate lay mainly between Boston Road, Little Ealing Lane, and Ealing Road and whose wife Louisa Trevor (d. 1855), a leading social figure, made the gardens. After her death Ealing Park was leased by 1863 to J. Wainright, and then to James Budgett, before its sale by Sir Trevor Lawrence, Bt. (d. 1913). Acquired in part in 1882 by the British Land Company, much of the grounds had been built over by 1898, when the house was a convent of the Ladies of Nazareth; by 1912 it was St. Anne’s Convent School founded by the Sisters of Charity. Built in the late eighteenth century and soon extended, the house has two stories and nine bays, with a pedimented central projection and, on the east front, a single-story Ionic colonnade’ (British History Online).

The survey is the work of John Woodward and is drawn at the scale of about 130 feet to the inch. Eden lists Woodward as practising 1736-41 so this work extends his known working life. He is described as an estate surveyor in Buckinghamshire and Middlesex. PROVENANCE: Sotheby’s 12 December 1994 lot 142. British History Online. Ealing and Brentford: Other Estates; Eden (1979) ‘Dictionary of Land Surveyors’.