A collector's palace

An outstanding celebration of the Tudor and Stuart worlds has passed another important milestone in its history. 

- Clive Aslet

WHEN the chapel at Crosby Moran Hall was dedicated, to the sound of early music, earlier this year, a new chapter opened in the history of this extraordinary building. Most Londoners have seen little beyond the outside walls of what is effectively a new palace overlooking Cheyne Walk on the north side of Battersea Bridge, but readers of COUNTRY LIFE have been given several privileged glimpses of it over the years, most recently in February 18, 2015. This article is not the last we are likely to publish, as there are more remarkable plans in view for this property, but it shows the house approaching fruition as the London equivalent of the Frick Museum in New York, US. Whereas the Frick contains art of many periods, however, Crosby Moran’s architecture and collections are all Tudor and early Stuart and, at some future date, will be accessible to specialist groups and other visitors.

The story begins in the 1970s, with a successful young businessman taking walks along the towpath on the other side of the Thames. Christopher Moran was 21 when he bought his first piece of Tudor furniture, beginning a lifetime of single-minded collecting and scholarship at the highest level. Looking across the river, he saw Crosby Hall, built between 1466 and 1475 by the wool merchant and diplomat Sir John Crosby on Bishopsgate in the City of London. It was a house that Elizabethan historian John Stow described as ‘verie large and beautiful and the high- est at that time in London’.