After spending seven years practising as a doctor in Boston, William Stukeley moved to London in 1717. The following years were his most fertile, but by 1725 he had become disillusioned with Town and decided to move to Grantham in his home county of Lincolnshire. During his brief stay, 1726–9, he modernised his seventeenth-century yeoman’s house, and simultaneously developed ideas on the religion of the Druids and garden design that were unique and interacted with each other. Both were greatly influenced by the archaeological discoveries he had made at Stonehenge and Avebury (1719–24). At the same time he gradually changed his ideas on Christianity, which led to ordination in 1729 and a great change in his life.

Spalding Gentlemen’s Society holds, among its varied collections of William Stukeley papers, a virtually unknown set of forty-four important drawings dating from 1720–64. It is an intimate collection closely connected with Stukeley and his immediate family: portraits, his houses and gardens in Lincolnshire and Kentish Town, and a few miscellaneous family history papers. Originally, the collection was bound into an album which, as the latest drawing dates from the year before Stukeley’s death, was almost certainly compiled post mortem by a family member. For many years the collection was lost, but recent investigation has revealed that c 1866–7 it was purchased by Sir Thomas Phillipps, Bart., and sold at auction in 1910. It has been in Spalding ever since, arriving at the Spalding Gentlemen's Society possibly about 1950. Cataloguing the collection was recently undertaken by this author and the enhanced significance given by this and the revealed provenance enabled the Society to apply successfully to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a grant towards conservation and storage. The great value of the collection is that it hugely increases our knowledge of Stukeley’s houses and gardens, particularly his garden works, and illuminates the evolution of Stukeley’s thoughts on garden design.