Little is known of his life, and his work is dubiously inferred, rather than accurately known, from a folio of drawings in the Sir John Soane's Museum, to which Horace Walpole called attention, in 1780, in his Anecdotes of Painting; but how far these were his own is uncertain.[1]
He was engaged on a number of important English houses of his time, and several, such as Longleat, have been attributed to him on grounds which cannot be sustained,[1] because they were built before he was born. In 1570 when he was five years old, he laid the foundation stone of Kirby Hall, Northamptonshire his father being the Master mason of the project.[2] He was probably the designer of Charlton House, in Charlton, London; the original Longford Castle, Wiltshire; Condover Hall and the original Holland House, Kensington; and he is said to have been engaged on Rushton Hall, Northamptonshire, and Audley End, Essex (with Bernard Janssens).[1]
Thorpe's major contribution to world architecture is the humble and now-ubiquitous corridor, included in a 1597 plan of a "Great House" in Chelsea, London, allowing independent access to rooms.[3] Thorpe marked the corridor in the plan, thought to be for Beaufort House for Sir Robert Cecil, as "A long Entry through all". Previously, grand houses had a so-called enfilade arrangement of rooms in which each room led to the next via connecting internal doors. The enfilade remained popular in continental Europe long after the corridor was widely adopted in England. Thorpe's inspiration may have been the one-sided covered walkway common in monastic cloisters.[4]
From 1611 he was assistant to Robert Tresswell, Surveyor-General of Woods South of the Trent. He retired in the 1630s but seems to have lived to an advanced age, dying around 1655.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Thorpe, John". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 26 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 882.
