Page 147 - Wish Stream Year of 2018

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The story of the Duke of York’s started in the reign of King George lll when the site on King’s Road, which had previously been the London home of the Earls of Cadogan, was bought by the government of the day, reacting to an initia- tive of the Duke of York, to house the ‘Royal Mili- tary Asylum for the (orphaned) Children of Sol- diers of the Regular Army’. This, incidentally, had been the original brainchild of John Le Marchant, although he had intended to call in a ‘Legion’, envisaged as the Third Department of the Royal Military College. John Sanders was called in to design the now familiar and very dignified build- ing that dominates the top end of King’s Road.
The Asylum was designed to house 1,000 orphans – 300 girls in the south wing (on the Royal Hospital side) and 700 boys in the north wing, which runs parallel with the King’s Road. The sexes were carefully segregated by the mess rooms that made up the large centre block.
But the girls didn’t last long. They moved to Southampton (located in old cavalry barracks) in 1823 and the boys took over the whole building until they too left in 1909 to move to the present site in Dover as the Duke of York’s Royal Military School. The building then became the Duke of York’s Headquarters, home to the Territorial Army in London until purchased back by Cadogan Estates in 2003 and redeveloped to contain the Saatchi Gallery and other organisations.
Sanders was the first president of the Architects’ and Antiquaries’ Club. In later life, he became an archaeologist in the Mediterranean and Middle East. He died at Reigate, Surrey early in 1826.
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Alexander Copland (building contractor)
Alexander Copland (1774–1834) was born on 14 May 1774, in the parish of St Martin-in-the- Fields, London, the only surviving son of a builder specialising in the upper end of the London market.
Copland was edu-
cated at a school at Sowerby, near Thirsk, Yorkshire, and in Novem- ber 1784 bound as an apprentice to Richard Holland, surveyor, at the Stationers’ Company in London. His father bequeathed him his estate, said to be worth £10,000 (around £700,000 in today’s money*), on his death. He married Lucy Gifford of Turnham Green (then in Middlesex) in
1796 and had three sons and one daughter.
Copland’s significance lies in his being the ear- liest of the great building contractors. He was called on to build barracks, often in country areas, with great rapidity, and based his opera- tions in London, where he largely recruited a workforce of hundreds of men of all trades whom he supplied with tools, in contrast to the tradition by which the artisan supplied his own. He enforced a new degree of labour discipline, ascribing his success ‘in completing work on schedule to his having always employed a great many more Superintending Clerks and Foremen than is usual for the number of men, in order to compel the workmen to do their duty’’.
Copland’s career progressed largely through personal contacts. His brother-in-law, Henry
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