HYLAND
In 1547 the 1st Duke of Somerset built Syon House
on the estate, now Crown property, raising its Italian
Renaissance edifice over the foundations of the west
end of the huge abbey church, the
size of a cathedral. Many imbroglios
attended Syon over the next fifty
years, including the execution, in
1552, of the Duke of Somerset
himself. In 1594, Henry Percy, 9th
Earl of Northumberland, acquired
Syon and the Percy family has lived
at Syon ever since.
By 1750, the first Duke and Duchess
of Northumberland had embarked
on a complete redesign of the Syon
Park estate, eventually engaging the
Scottish architect, Robert Adam, in
1762, to transform its interior, and
the landscape designer, 'Capability' Brown to lay out
the grounds in the fashion of the English Landscape
Movement. Both designers looked backward to an
historic Arcadia: Brown to the medieval deer park,
Adam to classical Rome.
Adam's knowledge and education were prodigious,
even for the time, learning Latin from the age of six, and
Greek at Edinburgh University, where he matriculated
at age fifteen. He was apprenticed to his father, William
Adam, Scotland's leading architect; and then, in 1754
