The Pagoda House

The Pagoda is a 3-storey Chinoiserie pavilion built between 1767-1780, as a summerhouse for Montague House (demolished 1815), which stood near the Ranger's House on Blackheath. Montague House was owned by the Dukes of Montague and their heirs, the Earl of Cardigan and Dukes of Buccleuch. In 1767 the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch married Lady Mary Montague and took over their Blackheath properties. The summerhouse was on a piece of land leased from the Earls of Dartmouth, which is referred to as the 'Remote Gardens' being detached from the main grounds of Montague House. The summerhouse was designed by Sir William Chambers (1723-96), who was well known for his championing of Chinoiserie, through his projects at Kew Gardens and writings on Chinese buildings. By 1815 it had been crowned with a lead-covered pagoda roof with 'upswept corners and hooked finials of forbidding size' (Pevsner), which may have been added c.1780.

The 3rd Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch are known to have commissioned a portable canvas pagoda that was probably used for archery meetings of the Toxophilite Society on Blackheath. The Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch left Montague House in 1799. Princess Caroline of Brunswick became an early tenant of The Pagoda after she separated from the Prince Regent in 1799, residing here and holding court until 1812. She set up a nursery school with a vegetable garden here; one of the children at the nursery was rumoured to be her child, and she was accused of having adulterous affairs at the property in the acrimonious divorce proceedings. The property reverted to the Dartmouth Estate in 1812 and then had a series of tenants for whom it was enlarged and altered a number of times. A wing with veranda was added in the early Nineteenth Century for the Legge family, and further additions were made in the mid Nineteenth for Lewis Glenton. There were originally more extensive grounds, but these were largely built over in the 1860s. The OS 25ins 2nd Edition (London CV) and revision of 1914 (London X.5) show the property (unnamed) on a plot that extended to the south, with a fountain marked and a number of garden buildings. The garden to The Pagoda is said to have been laid out in the 1920s in the style of Gertrude Jekyll.

By the 1950s the Pagoda was owned by the LCC and used as a children's home, the property marked as such on the OS Maps TQ3876 - B (1957/8 revision) and TQ3876SE-C (1968 revision), and in the 1980s it became a temporary home for Tamil refugees. Ownership transferred to LB Lewisham in 1990, but it was threatened with demolition, in c.1992 it was purchased by a private buyer who restored it. During that time The Pagoda occasionally opened for London Open House. It was resold in 2012 and remains a private residence.