Building Periods
When Wriothesley converted Titchfield Abbey into his mansion, he kept the monastic frater as his hall and a gatehouse was built into the nave opposite (Graham 1969, p. 9). The converted nave with the Tudor gatehouse set in the middle indisputably forms the most conspicuous surviving part of the building. This superimposition makes the remains easy to explicate as only two periods of building are involved. (click on image to enlarge)
The first floor plan of Place House or Titchfield House as drawn by John Achard in 1737 is of great interest when juxtaposed with key locations of The Sonnets, Warwick Collins’s imaginary narrative of how Shakespeare wrote thirty of his sonnets in Titchfield. Despite uncertainties addressed by Wade and Watts (1989, p. 73) in the 1737 drawings, it is clear that the undiscovered northern range of Place House has not been considered by English Heritage as part of the Titchfield Abbey Conservation Area. This concern will be addressed in the proposed architecture project. (click on image to enlarge)