Edward William Godwin 

Edward William Godwin was born in Bristol in 1833. He received architectural training and began his career designing schools, churches and houses in and near Bristol. His brother brother Joseph Lucas Godwin was a civil engineer. In 1856 they joined forces and designed three RC churches. 

E.W. Godwin’s best known works include The Guildhall, Northampton and Town Hall, Congleton as well as the restoration of Dromore Castle and Castle Ashby. After moving to London in about 1862, he designed premises for the Fine Art Society in Bond Street and a studio for Princess Louise at Kensington Palace. As an architect, Godwin worked chiefly in the Gothic style. He was a frequent contributor to British Architect and published a number of books on architecture.

The painter James Whistler (1834-1903) commissioned Godwin to build him a house in Chelsea in 1877. Godwin completed the ‘White House’ in Tite Street in 1878 and Whistler moved there from a house in Cheyne Row. Whistler’s bankruptcy in 1879 forced the sale of the house along with the rest of the painter’s effects. The buyer of the house, an art critic, made alterations that Whistler and Godwin deplored. In 1881, Whistler moved into a different house in Tite Street, number 13, where he lived until 1885. Whistler and Godwin shared an interest in Chinese and Japanese art and collaborated in a number of projects involving interior design, including the design of the White House.

In the 1870s and 80s Godwin’s designs could be found at Liberty and Co.; his wallpapers, printed textiles, tiles, “art furniture” or metalwork set the tone in houses of those with an artistic and progressive bent. Oscar Wilde was among his clients, and Princess Louise, for whom he designed a studio at Kensington Palace.
Godwin designed Beauvale House, Newthorpe, Nottingham (1872–3), Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 37, and 39 The Avenue, and other houses at Bedford Park, Chiswick (1875–7), and several houses in Chelsea which were remarkably avant-garde for their time. The last include the White House, Tite Street (1877–9—demolished), for James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903); the studio-house at 44 Tite Street (1878–9), for the artist George Francis (‘Frank’) Miles (1852–91); the Tower House, 46 Tite Street (1881–5); and the interiors of 16 Tite Street (1884–5), for Oscar Wilde (1854–1900), which exemplified the ideal of the ‘House Beautiful’.

You can’t visit Beauvale House in Moorgreen. It’s not a tourist attraction, it’s somebody’s home. But it does hold a special place in Nottinghamshire’s literary history. It inspired DH Lawrence and the house and its gardens feature in several of his novels.

Beauvale and Lawrence
Beauvale House would cost you more than £1.5 million pounds to buy although it was only described as a modest country house by Lord and Lady Cowper, who owned the property in Lawrence’s time.
One of his school friends had an aunt, who was a housekeeper at Beauvale. He used to visit when Lord and Lady Cowper weren’t there. He had such a fascination with the property that, in his first novel, the White Peacock, he based his fictional family there.
It’s also thought the Gamekeeper’s hut, five minutes’ walk from the house in the woods, was the inspiration for Mellor’s hut in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Lady Chatterley bedded the gamekeeper.
“It was a brick built woodshed,” says Beauvale’s owner Janet Pratt. “It’s in quite a derelict state now. I don’t think they’d do it today looking at it!”
Janet’s husband Howard adds: “The forest was originally the ancient Sherwood forest. I think in Sons and Lovers, the bit where they’re running through the forest is down by the lake here (in the grounds of the house.)”

DH and the locals
You might have thought mentioning your home location would endear you to your neighbours but far from it.
“He wasn’t that keen on Eastwood as a place,” says Howard Pratt. “I think because of that the locals thought he was a bit of a jumped up chap. The Eastwood people didn’t really wish to know DH Lawrence at all.”
Janet adds: “He wrote about people living in the area at the time and just reinvented names. They knew who he was writing about. He didn’t ask their permission.”
About the house
Beauvale House is an important Grade II* Listed period house designed by the famous architect E W Godwin in Old English Revival Style and completed in 1873 for the 7th Earl Cowper. It stands in an elevated position, in around 4 acres and is dominated by a 90ft high tower. It’s surrounded by mature woodland.