MILLER, Sanderson - b. 1716 Radway, d. 1780 Radway

English architect and landscape designer. He was born, lived and died at Radway, on the Warwickshire estate bought by his father in 1712.

At the age of 15, Miller was already interested in antiquarian subjects, and while studying at St Mary Hall, Oxford he continued to develop his interest in England’s past, under the influence of William King. He inherited Radway Grange when he was 21, and a few years later started to redesign the Elizabethan house in a Gothic style. In the grounds he added a thatched cottage and octagonal tower based on Guy’s Tower at Warwick Castle.

This work at Radway established Miller’s reputation as a gentleman, or amateur, architect and landscape designer. His wide social circle, and contacts developed through his patron George Lyttelton, 1st Baron Lyttelton, led to many requests for his designs. He produced some classical buildings like the Shire Hall in Warwick and Hagley Hall, Worcestershire, but is more often associated with Gothic Revival work, as at Albury Hall, Oxfordshire and the Great Hall at Lacock Abbey. He is especially known for the evocative mock “ruined” castles he created at Hagley, Wimpole Hall and Ingestre Hall, Staffordshire though this last has since been demolished. Other places to which he contributed include Wroxton Abbey, Upton House Sham Castle and Siston Court and Tudor Court, Hanworth Park, the surviving part of a Royal hunting lodge used by Henry VIII.

Miller is regarded as an English pioneer of Gothic Revival architecture. He is mainly noted for adding picturesque garden buildings and features to the grounds of an estate.

Artificial castle ruin

Until the mid-eighteenth century, British architecture was wholly dominated by Palladianism. However, the supremacy of the Palladianism was on the wane in the second half of the century. The roughly simultaneous “discoveries” of both Greek Antiquity and the Middle Ages (the Gothic architecture) around the mid-eighteenth century brought with them a a basic, revolutionary change in historical perceptions of the time. When British architects and patrons now looked for a model for the design of their buildings, there was no longer a universally valid standard such as there had been in Palladianism up to the beginning of the eighteenth century. Now there were different styles of equal status from which one could choose.

In 1747, an artificial castle ruin was built on a hill in Hagley Hall by the founding father of Gothic Revival, Sanderson Miller. It was used to house the park keeper.