Half a century earlier the prestige of a ranking novelist, Sir Walter Scott, had helped to launch one of the most popular Picturesque modes, the Scottish Baronial, when he asked Blore to imitate the old Border castles in designing his house at Abbotsford. Now in 1861 Thackeray, a novelist many of whose novels were set, not in the Middle Ages, but in early eighteenth-century England and Virginia, designed for himself a house in Palace Green in London opposite Kensington Palace, much of which is more or less of that particular period. This house echoes the modest red-brick manor houses of the time of Queen Anne on both sides of the Atlantic, but it could hardly be less plausible. At the same time Wellington College by John Shaw (1803-70), which was begun in 1856, was reaching completion in a much richer, almost Second Empire, version of the Wren style of 1700. The serious adumbration of a Queen Anne mode really began a few years later with a small public commission of Nesfield’s. His lodge at Kew Gardens, designed in 1866 and built in 1867, though simple, is already almost an archaeological exercise in early eighteenth-century[266] brickwork (Figure 18). This Kew lodge he followed up a few years later with a big but remote country house, Kinmel Park near Abergele in Wales, built in 1871-4 though possibly designed a bit earlier. To this we will be returning shortly. Shaw had nothing to do with Kinmel Park, since his partnership with Nesfield came to an end in 1868; that was just after the completion of Cloverley Hall on which he certainly collaborated even if his personal contribution there cannot now be readily distinguished. Already in 1866, before Shaw parted from Nesfield, however, his own career had opened with the designing of the Bingley church (Plate 94A) and of Glen Andred, near Withyham in Sussex, a house of great originality of character (Plate 102B). [Illustration: Figure 18. W. Eden Nesfield: Kew Gardens, Lodge, 1867, elevation ]