Water House
“I am in solitude and poverty but very fat and well,” Samuel Palmer wrote in a letter from Water House. The handsomely proportioned dwelling just north of the bridge is most associated with the celebrated artist, but it has other points of interest too. A brick by an upper window is marked “W.H. 1704”, suggesting both the date of its construction and that it has always been called by the same name. In 1728, the property was described as a “house, barn, stables and outhouses, garden, cherry garden, and a field sown with sainfoin, in all about 8 to 10 acres”. By then it was owned by Robert Austen of Tenterden, a member of the family that was later to produce the famous author.
“I am in solitude and poverty but very fat and well,” Samuel Palmer wrote in a letter from Water House. The handsomely proportioned dwelling just north of the bridge is most associated with the celebrated artist, but it has other points of interest too. A brick by an upper window is marked “W.H. 1704”, suggesting both the date of its construction and that it has always been called by the same name. In 1728, the property was described as a “house, barn, stables and outhouses, garden, cherry garden, and a field sown with sainfoin, in all about 8 to 10 acres”. By then it was owned by Robert Austen of Tenterden, a member of the family that was later to produce the famous author.
It was divided into two dwellings by Benjamin Russell, a carpenter, in 1800, and he was to be the landlord of the Palmer family – Samuel, his father, brother and Samuel’s faithful nurse, Mary Ward – who moved into one half of the house in about 1827. They may have been forced to move out when the house passed into the hands of Russell’s widow and her second husband, a blacksmith called James Saker, in 1834 or 1835.
It’s likely that the house was less grand in those days than it appears now. It was converted back into a single home in about 1839, when the “late Georgian” front we see today was added. Revd Robert Auber, curate at Shoreham Church, was the owner at this point, and the improvements may have been a canny investment, as Auber sold the house for £700 a couple of years later.
In the early 1900s it was worth double that and owned by a wool-broker and keen church supporter, Archibald Balme, who ruefully noted how his pockets would empty of money whenever he would go with the vicar to offer help to poor villagers. He also donated the land where the war memorial was built. Madge Garland, an editor of Vogue and head of England’s first school of fashion design at the Royal College of Art, owned Water House in the war when it was badly damaged by a flying-bomb.
Less severe harm had been done back in Samuel Palmer’s day,
to judge by one of his letters. “Getting across the kitchen in a hurry, part of the floor broke under me with a great crack, and in a moment down went one of my drumsticks [legs] a good way into the cellar,” he wrote.
Text by James Saynor