Victorian
Among the architects who shaped the appearance of Leigh and the surrounding villages in the nineteenth century, few left a mark as distinctive as George Devey. Born in London in 1820 to a comfortable, well-off family, he did not begin his working life with drawing boards and building plans in mind. His first training was as a professional artist, and only after studying art did he turn to architecture. That early grounding in the painter's eye stayed with him throughout his career, and it helps to explain the picturesqueness of the houses, farms and cottages that came from his office.
The turning point in Devey's local story came through the church. The Rev. G R Boissier, vicar of Penshurst, took an interest in the young architect and, around 1850, brought him into the circle of Lord de Lisle. From that introduction flowed a long association with the Penshurst estate and with the families who owned land across the district, an association that would keep Devey busy for the better part of three decades.
His work for the de Lisle interest is still visible around Leicester Square. There Devey added the Post Office, and he also designed a row of cottages for the square. One of his most charming interventions was to link the old Guildhouse to cottages already standing beside it by inserting an arched upper storey between them, so that separate buildings read as one composed group. Nearby he built the Lodge. At Penshurst Place itself he was entrusted with restoration work, a responsibility that required both sensitivity to the ancient fabric and confidence in his own taste.
Leigh owes Devey some of its most familiar landmarks. In 1861 he built the new chancel of St Mary's, the cost being met by Lord de Lisle in his capacity as Rector of Leigh. To the south side of the church Devey added the octagonal tower that gives the building its distinctive silhouette. On the estate side of parish life, he drew up designs for four Lightfoot cottages, put up for the Penshurst Estate. Around 1864 he designed Park Cottage for Thomas Baily, and he was responsible for Park House and for the cottage at West Lodge. The village School, apart from its central block, came from his office too, and it is possible that Church Hill House was also his, though the evidence is not conclusive. Further afield he designed Hilden House, standing opposite Hildenborough Station, though that building has since been demolished.
Devey's country-house and estate work extended well beyond the churchyard. Viscount Henry Hardinge, who had served as Viceroy of India, lived at South Park, and in 1852 he commissioned Devey to design a model farm there. The scheme was a demonstration of the architect's method of weaving old and new together: a sixteenth-century barn was converted and brought into the complex, and a seventeenth-century building with a balcony was incorporated as well. The whole was conceived in the Tudor style from end to end, giving the farm the air of a much older establishment. Elsewhere he designed Swaylands in Penshurst and Hammerfield House.
His reputation spread to clients far beyond Kent. During the 1860s he worked for the Rothschild family, and they called on his services again in the later 1870s. Many of those who employed him were Liberals drawn from the wealthy manufacturing classes, men who were building or rebuilding country seats and who appreciated Devey's ability to make a new house look comfortably rooted in its landscape. When Samuel Morley bought the Hall Place Estate in 1870, it was Devey whom he commissioned to design the new Hall Place.
Devey never married. It was said, though never more than rumour, that he had loved Flora Streatfield of Chiddingstone. He ran a substantial practice, keeping ten people in his employment for years at a stretch — draughtsmen, a model maker and apprentices among them — a sign of how much work flowed through the office.
He was planning to retire when he caught pneumonia, and he died at Hastings in 1886, aged 66. His influence outlived him by generations. Sir Ernest George, who built The Square, Forge Square and South View in Leigh, learned from him, as did Norman Shaw, the architect of Scotland Yard, and Sir Edwin Lutyens himself. Jill Allibone published a book about Devey in 1991, and the local history society holds 500 digital pictures of his buildings — a fitting archive for an architect whose work still defines so much of the district.