Some people’s ancestors are kings or poets. I’m proud my family invented … the corridor

John Thorpe , an eminent Elizabethan designer and surveyor, is the man credited with inventing the corridor.

He was one of a succession of stonemasons and builders who worked in the Northamptonshire area from the late 1500s .

Thorpe ’s architectural reputation is up among the firmament of design stars that decorates the outside of the Victoria and Albert Museum .

John Thorpe set a template for English country living that went out around the world.

An earlier catalogue of Thorpe ’s album was made in the 1960s by Sir John Summerson .

He judged it perhaps the most important relic in existence of architectural drawings and designs in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I ’. But crucially, says Guerci , it was Thorpe who first imagined the grand stately home as we know it.

John Thorpe's invention of something as basic as a corridor might never have been patented.

The corridor was just the kind of solution to a technical problem that would later have merited legal status.

Alex Graham , creator of the BBC show Who Do You Think You Are? confesses he was also a sceptic at first .