Qualla: Boston Manor House

Boston Manor House: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.g.champion, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk. Dame Mary Reade had been a widow for less than a year when she began building the house. It was 1622. Her late husband, Sir William Reade, had inherited the manor of Boston from his stepfather Sir Thomas Gresham — the merchant who founded the Royal Exchange — but had never built on the land. Mary built. Within months she had remarried, to Sir Edward Spencer of Althorp, but the house remained hers in spirit; her initials are still set into the corner of the state drawing room ceiling, and the date of building is recorded in plasterwork that has hung above visitors' heads for four centuries.

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Image: P.g.champion | CC BY-SA 2.0 uk

Boston Manor House: The Manor Before the House

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada, CC BY 2.0. Land at Boston — recorded around the 1170s as Bordwadestone, probably meaning Bord's farmstead — sat at the southern edge of what would much later become the London Borough of Hounslow. Its boundaries were the River Brent on the east, the Thames on the south, and the line of what...

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Image: David Stanley from Nanaimo, Canada | CC BY 2.0

Boston Manor House: What Mary Reade Built

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.g.champion, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk. The house Mary built is three storeys of red brick, with three gables on the long sides and two on the short, set in twenty acres of parkland sloping down to the Brent. It is the only surviving Jacobean building in Hounslow. The grandest room is upstairs — the state drawing room,...

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Image: P.g.champion | CC BY-SA 2.0 uk

Boston Manor House: The Staircase and Its Trick

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.g.champion, CC BY-SA 2.0 uk. Walk through the porch on the east side — added by James Clitherow IV in the eighteenth century, when fashion turned the back of the house into the front — and the first thing the building offers is its staircase. Square oak newel posts hold up banisters with carved, tapered balu...

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Image: P.g.champion | CC BY-SA 2.0 uk

Boston Manor House: The Clitherows and the Long Slow Sale

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit P.g.champion, Public domain. In 1670, the executors of John Goldsmith — Mary Reade's heir — sold Boston to a wealthy London merchant named James Clitherow I for £5,136, 17s, 4d. The Clitherow family would own the manor for the next two and a half centuries. They added extensions to the north for kitchen serv...

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Image: P.g.champion | Public domain

Boston Manor House: What the Public Inherited

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit KTo288, CC BY-SA 2.5. John Bourchier Stracey-Clitherow sold the last twenty acres of the estate in 1923 to Brentford Urban District Council, which opened the grounds as a public park in 1924. The house itself suffered serious damage during the Second World War when a V-1 flying bomb fell across the ro...

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Image: KTo288 | CC BY-SA 2.5