Pope's Villa. Pope's villa was the residence of Alexander Pope at Twickenham, then a village west of London in Middlesex. He moved there in 1719 and created gardens and an underground grotto. The house and grotto were topics of 18th-and 19th-century poetry and art. In about 1845, a neo-Tudor house known as Pope's Villa was built on approximately the same site; it has been used as a school since the early 20th century. Pope's Grotto, which is listed Grade II* by Historic England, survives and is occasionally open to the public. Alexander Pope moved in 1719 to Twickenham, where many wealthy Londoners had houses. From Thomas Vernon, a local landowner, he leased a piece of land close to the water on a stretch of the River Thames known as Cross Deep; there were two cottages on the site and Vernon added a third. Pope demolished one cottage and part of a second and employed the architect James Gibbs to create a house in Palladian style, which became known as Pope's villa. He had it extended with a portico by William Kent in 1733. Contemporary drawings and paintings of Pope's villa show a fairly conventional classical 18th-century English country house rather than a faithful reproduction or pastiche of a Palladian villa. The house was on three floors, with a central corps de logis of three bays under a hipped roof, flanked by two lower wings of only one bay each with rooves concealed by a closed parapet. The flanking bays had ashlar quoins. The only decoration to the facade consisted of a pedimented window at the centre of the principal floor, and a stone urn at each termination of the closed parapet. An unusual feature of the facade was at its centre on the ground floor—a large elliptical arch with dominating voussoirs. The arch, flanked by small Florentine Renaissance style windows, is redolent of a water entrance to the portico of a Venetian palazzo. Bearing in mind the proximity of Pope's Villa to the River Thames, this resemblance is unlikely to be coincidental. The arch, or portal, was contained in a ground projection of the corps de logis which formed the base for the modest portico, more a porch; asked by Pope for his opinion of this renovation, Lord Burlington wrote that my friend Kent has done all that can be, considering the place. Pope planted a weeping willow on the small piece of land next to the house, and on about 5 acres across the street now also called Cross Deep, laid out one of the first picturesque gardens. According to Pope himself, the garden included a Theatre, an Arcade, a Bowling Green, a Grove, and a 'What Not'. After receiving a licence to do so in 1720, he constructed a tunnel leading from under the house to the garden, and branching from this, a Romantic grotto. After Pope's death in 1744, the house was acquired by Sir William Stanhope, who enlarged it with the addition of side wings in 1758. He also extended the garden, and built a second tunnel; what remains of this is a Grade II* listed building. Little remains of the garden, but the site was listed Grade II on 1 October 1987 and a brick gazebo is also a Grade II listed building. The house remained in Stanhope's family until 1807, when Baroness Howe of Langar bought it; she had it demolished the following year and built a new house next to the site, and also removed some of the decorations from the grotto and made further changes to the garden. Baroness Howe's house was subsequently partially demolished and the remainder divided into two houses, Ryan House and River Deep. Pope's villa and its gardens and grotto were frequently mentioned in poetry and depicted in art. Beginning with Pope's own verse and continuing after his death, rapidly. established itself as the seat of the Muses, and his garden as a model of landscape design. Even more numerous are pictures of the house: although the facade facing the road does not seem to have been depicted, at least 55 drawings, paintings, aquatints, engravings, etchings, and lithographs produced between 1730 and 1888 survive which show the river facade or the grotto. These began with drawings and paintings by Pope himself and his friends and continued with works he may have commissioned and throughout much of the 19th century. Samuel Scott painted two versions of a view of Pope's villa after Stanhope's additions. When it was demolished, J. M. W. Turner, who was a neighbour, objected; his painting Pope's Villa at Twickenham mourns its loss. Originally the grotto was intended to appear natural. In 1725 Pope wrote to his friend Edward Blount of Blagdon, Paignton in Devon: I have put the last hand to my works. happily finishing the subterraneous Way and Grotto: I then found a spring of the clearest water, which falls in a perpetual Rill, that echoes thru' the Cavern day and night.