Kenwood: Ken Partridge plans, 1964 - part 1.

Regulars will be familiar with my generally tortuous and laboured attempts to make sense of the layout at Kenwood during the Lennon-era, based, as they have been, upon various plans from long before/after the good ol' Schwingin' Shikshtiesh. Well, one of the "holy grails" (if that's not too ridiculous a way of putting it) has just fallen into my lap (not literally); namely the original "Lennon" plans (click on the above for a better look), dated 23rd October 1964, with Ken Partridge's notes indicating specific renovations...and though it does answer several questions, inevitably it throws up several more.

To start with what is there - we can now see that what was referred to as the den was indeed that room to the left of the living room. The split level nature of the kitchen is now clear as well; I found it hard to visualise what that would have looked like - but there it is. So that window to the right of the entrance was actually the kitchen window during John's time. What's also interesting is how close the ground floor was to the original 1913 layout.

However, and glaringly obviously, where is the sunroom?!? In October '64, it is clear from this plan that it had yet to be built. There don't appear to be records of any further planning applications (I've looked), so the exact date of the construction of the sunroom remains unclear - but it has to be late '64 or early '65. And what about the north-west extension? Well, it's just possible that it was there, but it's not on this plan for a reason - which I'll come onto in a future post. Still, fantastic to have a major piece of the puzzle finally in place.