Place Name
Named after Joshua Vanneck, Lord Huntingfield (December 31, 1745 – August 15, 1816), who bought Roehampton Great House, the former home of the Westons and the Countess of Devonshire. In 1777 he had the property knocked down and rebuilt to the designs of James Wyatt with Robert Adam overseeing the interior. The new property was called Roehampton Grove, and so clearing up a small local confusion as there there had been two Roehampton Houses in the area from around 1712. Vanneck was the son of a self-made London merchant, also called Joshua, who had come to London in 1722 from The Hague, in the Netherlands. Here he joined his elder brother Gerard and the two made a substantial fortune in commerce. In 1790 he succeeded his elder brother as Member of Parliament for the notorious rotten borough of Dunwich, a seat he held until 1816, first as a Pettite (Tories who affiliated with William Pitt the Younger) and later as a Tory candidate. The family’s connections to the local area were cemented with Joshua’s marriage to Maria Thompson, the daughter of a local Roehampton landowner.
