Chapter 2: Matthew Fagg
Architect designed?
The cost of building Exmouth House is uncertain, though some attempt will be made to estimate this in the next chapter. It is certainly a house of considerable distinction, and in this connection a tantalising clue comes from the doggerel verses on the Old Town by the former postman, Thomas Brandon Brett (1816-1906), ‘Rhymed Reminiscences of Hastings and St Leonards’. In his account of the house and its owners, Brett writes of Matthew Fagg:
This house he had built from a draughtsman’s design,/ Some eighteen years back from this year ‘Thirty-nine.
The date more or less tallies with what has just been indicated, but the notion that the house was constructed ‘from a draughtsman’s design’ - i.e., presumably a professional architect -- is highly intriguing.17 It ties in with the house’s evident pretensions, but is unfortunately impossible to pursue. The only architect of national significance associated with Hastings at this time was Joseph Kay, who designed St Mary in the Castle and Pelham Crescent and who subsequently lived in a house of his own design at Belmont, but there is no reason to suspect any association with him. More modestly, Pigot’s Commercial Directory for 1823-4 mentions in his ’Miscellaneous’ category for Hastings one James Pankhurst, an ‘architect & surveyor’ based in the High Street, but nothing more is known of him, so the matter cannot be pursued. Instead, let us turn to a detailed description of the actual house itself, including its curtilage.
17 T. Brett, ‘Rhymed Reminiscences of Hastings and St Leonards’, a scrapbook of verses on local people and events cut out from Brett’s Gazette, and pasted into a volume now in Hastings Reference Library. Since the whole of Brett’s account of Exmouth House will be quoted in the course of this narrative, it is perhaps worth recording its slightly banal opening:
But I no longer at Rock-house now stay;/ So, march I in “quickstep” to over the way,/ To house known as Exmouth, where one Matthew Fagg/ Will something obtain from my letter-man’s bag.