Woodlands House
Woodlands House is a Grade II* listed Georgian villa, nextdoor to Mycenae House, Mycenae Road, in the Westcombe Park area of the Royal Borough of Greenwich, in southeast London. Having previously been used as a convent, from 1972 to 2003 the building served as a library and art museum, known as the Woodlands Art Gallery. Today it houses a Steiner School.
History
The building was built on a site leased in 1774 from Sir Gregory Page by John Julius Angerstein. Angerstein made his fortune in the East Indian trade as well as having West Indian business links, including a third share in a slave plantation in Grenada. His art collection was bought in 1824 to form the nucleus of the National Gallery, London. Angerstein occupied a house in nearby Crooms Hill, Greenwich, while the villa was constructed over the next two years to a design by local architect George Gibson and was completed in the summer of 1776.It was described in Daniel Lysons' The Environs of London :
"Woodlands, the seat of John Julius Angerstein, Esq., occupies a situation uncommonly beautiful. The surrounding scenery is very picturesque; and the distant view of the river, and the Essex shore, is broken with good effect by the plantations near the house. The grounds were laid out, and the house built about the year 1772, by the present proprietor, who has a small but valuable collection of pictures; among which Sir Joshua Reynolds's celebrated portrait of Garrick between Tragedy and Comedy, the Venus, a well known picture, by the same artist; a fine portrait of Rubens, by Vandyke; and a very beautiful landscape, with cattle, by Cuyp, claim particular notice. The greenhouse is to be remarked for its collection of heaths."
Angerstein extended Woodlands in the late 18th century, adding a west wing, conservatory, out-buildings and a stable and riding school. After Angerstein's death in 1823, the property became the family home of his son John Angerstein.
In the late 1890s, the property was purchased by the shipbuilder Sir Alfred Fernandez Yarrow. It became the Yarrow family home and later, during the First World War, served as a hostel for Belgian refugees. In the 1920s, it was sold to a Catholic religious order, the Little Sisters of the Assumption, for use as a convent and novitiate; during the 1930s, an adjacent building was constructed to expand the novitiate accommodation. The convent operated as part of the wider Assumptionist community centred around Our Lady of Grace Church and Highcombe House on Charlton Road, approximately east of Woodlands House.