Description
The Hope Mausoleum was built in 1818 for the eminent art collector, connoisseur and promoter of the Neo-Classical style Thomas Hope (30 August 1769 – 2 February 1831) was a Dutch and British merchant banker, author, philosopher and art collector, best known for his novel Anastasius. It was probably designed by William Atkinson, who was working on both the Deepdene and Hope's London house in Duchess street at this period, but with significant contributions from Hope himself.
To date no original architect's plans or contemporary images have been discovered.
On 16 April 1806, Hope married the Irish beauty Louisa Beresford.
The couple had four sons and a daughter: Henry Thomas (1807), Charles William (1808), Louisa Elizabeth (1810), Adrian John (1811) and Alexander James Beresford (1820)
Tragically, Charles died in 1817 at the age of eight, during a tour of Italy.
Thomas Hope died on 2nd February 1831 in London and was buried ten days later in the family mausoleum at Deepdene in accordance with his wishes that his body 'be deposited in the quietest manner next to that of my ever lamented son Charles'.
The estate was inherited by Hope's eldest son Henry Thomas, who made extensive alterations to the Deepdene, completed around 1840, and enlarged the estate. He was buried in the mausoleum in 1862.
The Hope Mausoleum first appears on the First Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1869 and appears on the 1896 and 1914 editions without any changes.
Thomas Hope's great-grandson and eventural heir, Lord Francis Pelham Hope (8th Duke of Newcastle) ran up enormous debts forcing him to sell the contents of the Deepdene in 1917. By 1920 the estate was divided and sold with much of the parkland developed for residential use. The last interment in the mausoleum was of the 8th Duke of Newcastle, buried here in 1941, by which time nine of the thirty-three loculi (recesses for coffins) were filled by members of the Hope family.
In 1951 the mausoleum was listed Grade II. In 1957, following repeated attempts by vandals to break into the mausoleum the doorway was permanently sealed with bricks and a cement render and the roof of the structure was strengthened with a three inch thick cement render. In 1960 the mausoleum and about one and a half acres of the surrounding land were donated to Mole Valley Urban District for the benefit of the public. The proposal was that the council 'cover over the mausoleum and make the whole area into a garden with garden seats, providing a suitable plaque was erected at the site recording the mausoleum's existence'. At some time between 1960 and 1973 the mausoleum was buried but the surroundings were not turned into a garden. In June 2009 part of the top of the south-east front of the mausoleum was uncovered.
The main house, the Deepdene, first operated as a hotel run by Madame Coletta from 1918, became Southern Railway Company offices in 1939 and was sold by British Railways in 1967 to a development company. It was demolished in 1969 and replaced by an office block.
https://dorkingmuseum.org.uk/local-history/great-estates/the-deepdene/
https://www.regencyhistory.net/2020/09/thomas-hope-art-collector-and-author-of.html