Aberglasney

     

     To Aberglasney Tuesday where summer is fading into autumn. Afterwards a short walk up the hill to the village hall, aka 'The Temperance Hall', and an art and antiques exhibition by Studio Cennen, a revival of the exhibitions that they held in the hall before Lockdown.

Cecil Beaton at the Garden Museum I

Apologies for the late arrival of this post. Family crisis.

     Wednesday and my first visit to the Garden Museum hard by Lambeth Palace, the London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury.  I walked from Waterloo Station, where people were gathering in their finery for a day at Ascot, along the Thames to Lambeth. I think that part of the embankment beside St Thomas Hospital is the finest bit of riverside we have in central London. 

     The Garden Museum is housed in the former church of St Mary-at-Lambeth - an ancient site.  The tower is late medieval (c1370, when the rest of the church was rebuilt) but the body of the church is 19th century by Philip Hardwick, replacing a much more picturesque structure, which was, in fact until the 19th century a village church.*  Both tower and church are built of Kentish Rag.  The 'Buildings of England' volume on South London, however, says that the arcades and clearstory are medieval, but it all felt Victorian to me.  The Historic England website says the nave and aisles are all 19th century and the Survey of London agrees.  Either way the result of Hardwick's restoration is such that it would be very easy to dismiss the whole building as just another Victorian suburban church.**

      That would be a mistake, as given its location St Mary's is, or was, another example of an Anglican establishment church.  After all the church does contain the graves of some six archbishops of Canterbury, and members of their various households.***  Bishops Tunstall and Thirlby are also buried there, as is Admiral Bligh, the antiquary Elias Ashmole, and (most importantly for the subsequent history of the church) the Tradescant family.  (The church is generally rich in monuments.)  All that being so, it strikes me as odd, to say the least, that the church was allowed to become redundant (1972) in the first place and was scheduled for demolition.  For four years church and churchyard fell into decay as it awaited its fate.  Apparently they were to make way for a coach park for Waterloo Station.  That surely can't be true, can it?  Didn't the Church really not care about its patrimony?  The answer to the latter question is probably 'no it did not', and that remains true today.

     The church may not have cared, but Rosemary and John Nicholson did.  In 1976 they visited the churchyard in search of the Tradescant Tomb.  The scene of desolation they encountered galvanised them into action, and later that year it seems Lambeth council restored the graveyard.  In 1978 the Tradescant Trust was founded with the aim of restoring the church as a 'Museum of the History of the Garden'.  In 1981 the museum held its first exhibition, and two years later the Queen Mother opened the new garden - I think that was the now lost knot-garden designed for the museum by the Marchioness of Salisbury.  The rest, so they say, is history.

 

     

 *  The village has been now largely swept away, to be replaced with commercial properties.  The church and palace, and the former rectory, and one side of Pratt St appear to be the only things left.

** I can't help that Hardwick, although faithful to the remaining parts of the Medieval structure, souped things up a bit - possibly heightening the nave and aisles and certainly increasingly the pitch of the roof.  Late Medieval roofs are, as a rule, at a much lower pitch.

*** A cursory look at the List of Vicars shows that many were also domestic chaplains to the Archbishop and were destined for higher things - heads of Oxbridge colleges, deaneries, and bishoprics.

I'm ready for my close-up now Mr DeMille.

    

     The last time I visited Brighton I stayed the weekend with my friend Richard.  He lived in Brunswick Place in a top floor flat. Unhappily, the weekend did not go well.  However, on Sunday we walked into the centre of Brighton the back way, along Landsdowne Rd etc., avoiding the vile Western Avenue.  At the far end we paused for me to take some pictures of the somewhat eccentric Gothick Wykeham Terrace - all grey and white stucco and pinnacles - when a first floor window opened and voiced called out 'I'm ready for close-up now, Mr DeMille.'  He, Michael, then invited us in, at one point leaving us - two strangers - alone in his sitting room while he went downstairs to the kitchen.  The sitting-room was 'pure' Late Sixties/Early Seventies - white painted Gothic book shelves and a lime green carpet.  It was all rather stylish.  He returned some minutes later with some headed note paper and an invitation to tea sometime.  I remember him announcing that at one time he 'had Roy Strong on one side of me and Flora Robson and her sisters on the other.'  Or words to that effect.

     Sadly, I never returned for tea and never saw Michael or Richard again.  I wish I had, particularly Michael as he was a hoot and I was keen to record his house, but that weekend spelt the end of my friendship with Richard.  We last spoke at the beginning of lockdown, but alas, I think Richard must of died during those grim months.  

     This has turned out to be a less than cheerful introduction to a post about a couple of books by Sir Roy Strong, or as they used to call him in Private Eye, Dr Strange, than intended. However it is just about the only anecdote I have about the man, so it will have to do.

     Roy Strong is a bit of National Treasure.  Quite the Renaissance man: scholar, curator, writer (Author of some 43 (!) books, some in collaboration with his late wife, the designer Julia Trevelyan Oman), garden designer and maker, aesthete, dandy and habitue of the Beau Monde.  And I must say I'm a fan.  His first volume of published diaries 'The Roy Strong Diaries 1967-1987' is quite one of my favourite books and along with 'A Chequered Past' by Peter Schlesinger opens a window on the fascinating, now long vanished, interlocking worlds of Bohemia and the Beau Monde in Late Sixties/Early Seventies London.  A world essentially ended by the Oil Crisis of 1973.
    Therefore imagine my excitement when the bf announces he's found a cache of Strong's books for sale at Aberglasney.  After some toing and froing, I ended up with these five books.  The books that interest me most are the autobiographical 'Roy Strong: Self-portrait as a young man', 2013, and the 'The Renaissance Garden in England' 0f 1978 & 1998. (This is the paperback 1998 edition)

     'Roy Strong: Self Portrait as a Young Man' fleshes out part of that period covered in 'The Roy String Diaries'.  It is fascinating, partly because my own background shares some similarities with his - lower middle class and living in a 'semi', though I didn't actually live in suburbia, but (as I've said before) in a small market town in Lincolnshire.  I suspect that our tastes, and attitudes, are pretty much the same: 'a committed Royalist; an Oxford Movement Christian; a lover of Old England, its great houses, churches and landscape; in short, at this stage of my life, a prototype of the later Young Fogeys, conservative by instinct and not at all an Angry Young Man of the Colin Wilson/John Osbourne variety.'  (All that said, I suspect that Osbourne was probably more culturally conservative than assumed at the time.)
   At times this book reads like an Evelyn Waugh novel with our hero ascending the 'greasy pole' from Winchmore Hill in Enfield to Keeper of the National Portrait gallery at 32 and eventually Director of the V&A at 38.  If I remember rightly from the Diaries enjoying some very long lunches in the process and all the while encountering a whole flight personalities and eccentrics in the process, often immensely talented and but tragically flawed: the critic and exhibition maestro Dickie Buckle, and the artist Astrid Zydower spring to mind.  There is wonderful photograph - very 'Sixties' - of Buckle, Strong, and Buckle's assistant, Joe Predera.  They are standing amidst the chaos of the hang for the ground breaking Cecil Beaton exhibition of 1968.  Buckle looks like he's nicked his shirt from a production of Swan Lake, giving him the look a particularly robust and brassy barmaid. It seems to sum up a whole era.

    

     'The Renaissance Garden in England' is one of Strong's more academic works, a very 'Warburg Institute'* book, showing the influence of Strong's PhD tutor at the Warburg, Dame Frances Yates.  Yates (1899-1981) was another of those eccentric figures in Strong's life, a historian whose field of study was the Renaissance esoteric tradition; her published books such as 'Giordano Bruni and the Hermetic Tradition', and 'The Rosicrucian Enlightenment', reflect this.  Rather like the other books I have mentioned in this post it sheds light on a lost world, for very few of the gardens discussed in this book actually survive.  A world of great formal gardens full of symbolism and allegory, of grottos and mechanical wonders, places where the esoteric and the scientific were not yet estranged.
     Given that dearth of source materials ie gardens, Strong relies on written descriptions and contemporaneous paintings, drawings and prints.  Quite fascinating those prints in themselves.  Only one Hollar, but there are a small number taken from the wonderful 'Britannia Illustrata' of 1709.  In addition there is a liberal sprinkling of poetry of the period.  The result of all this is a rich, polymathic, satisfying bricolage of a book, the design of which appears to me, at least, to be heavily influenced by Mark Girouard's books such as 'Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan House' which were designed by Girouard's wife Dorothy.

*  The Warburg Institute is part of the University of London.  It was originally established in Hamburg in 1909.  In 1933, with the rise of the Nazi Party to power in Germany, the Institute was relocated to London. 

Spalding III: Ayscoughfee Hall and gardens

     Adjacent to the parish church is Ayscoughee Hall, a late medieval house started in 1429 and added to and altered over the years.  It now belongs to South Holland District Council who run it as a museum, and is open to the public everyday except Tuesdays - Market Day in Spalding, along with Saturday.
     Built of dark red brick with stone dressings, and although a little municipal in feel, the Hall is a discreetly attractive, picturesque building - a mixture of 'genuine' Medieval Gothic, Georgian and Early Victorian Gothic and the classical; at times formal at others domestic. Sprawling.  For me the most interesting feature is the oddly detailed bay lighting the back of the hall. Almost as though it has arrived from the Late Medieval Holy Roman Empire. Interesting too that odd little door adjacent  very like the priest's door on one of the side chapels in St Mary's church. 

   The interior is fun but a little chill.  A sense that it was a bit of a challenge to fill the spaces.  As I have mentioned before one of the upstairs rooms was floor to ceiling with glass cases of stuffed birds.  All flown, alas. Period furniture and decor would certainly help warm the place up a bit.  The best spaces are the entrance hall, - a neo-classical refit of the original great hall - and the the warmly, Victorian, paneled library.  I could spend many happy hours there.  The great hall retains its original medieval roof, and and bay window.  

     In the early eighteenth century Ayscoughfee was the home to Maurice Johnson the founder of the Spalding Gentleman's Society, an example of thriving provincial cultural life.  Its members included Pope, Addison, Sir Hans Sloane, and the Lincolnshire antiquary William Stukeley.
     The hall stands in the remains of a formal, walled garden of c1730, which contains the the only building in Lincolnshire to be designed by the great Sir Edwin Lutyens - the town War Memorial of 1925.  In addition there are a number of sixties additions: a café and an aviary.  The 'Buildings of England' suggests that the designer of the gardens was the local architect William Sands.  The yew hedges have long since escaped their original bounds and now form huge billowing cloud-shapes.  It would be a shame to loose them in a full restoration of the garden, but certain features, like the enormous, and missing, gate pier at the back of the house could be put back to match the surviving pier and that would add hugely to the romance of the place.

Houghton Hall I: The Park & Gardens

Than in we went to the garden gloyous,

Lyke to a place of pleasure and solacyous.

Amiddes the garden so myche delectable

There was an heber fayre and quadrante,

To paradyse right well camparable,

Set all about with flours fragraunt;

And in the myddle there was respledyshaunte

A dulcet spring and marvaylous fountaine,

Of golde and asure made all certaine.

     On the Wednesday we had yet another jaunt.  We drove north into Norfolk, turning off the A10 at Downham Market we headed north-east along the A1122 crossing the Devil's Dyke and on to the market town of Swaffham. After a brief stop for refreshments we headed north through Castle Acre (we must return there sometime) and then along the ancient trackway known as Peddars Way and through the Massinghams and Harpley.  Norfolk was looking very dry and dusty after the vivid, lush landscape of Wales. 

     Turning off the A148 we found ourselves at the head of a wide avenue of chestnut trees leading gently downhill to a small village, New Houghton - just two neat rows of whitewashed cottages on either side of the road - that was established to house the villagers evicted when the park was extended southwards, leaving the village church marooned in the midst of the park and the villagers with a bit of a schlep every Sunday morning and afternoon.  Ahead of us a pair of great wrought iron gates also painted white.  We had arrived.  Houghton Hall home of the Cholmondelys, built by Sir Robert Walpole (1676 - 1745), 1st Earl of Orford, not as a result, but as part of his political ascent.
      Through the gates we entered a well wooded park.  The drive swung gently in an arc to approach the Hall at a suitably picturesque angle; the park was originally laid out by Bridgeman in the early 1700s in the Baroque manner, and, as at Wimpole and countless other country houses, it was subsequently altered in the Picturesque landscape tradition.  The alterations were perhaps not as drastic here as elsewhere and three of the four main avenues survive.  The most important runs E-W through the 'state centre' of the house.  A version of Bridgeman's plan is illustrated in the 3rd vol of Colen Campbell's 'Vitruvius Britannicus'.  I've written 'version' because I suspect it does not show the park and gardens as they were actually laid out.

     As the house was not open for another half hour we decided to do the gardens first then rather than have lunch.  It was quite the best thing to do.  There are two gardens at Houghton - one beside the house and the second created with the walls of the old kitchen garden, which - with the stables - is to one side and out of sight of the house. The new gardens were started in 1991 and are the work of the then head gardener, Paul Underwood and, later, the garden designers Julian and Isobel Bannerman.  All three are to be congratulated.  The new gardens are superb; the vast space of the kitchen garden has been divided up into a number of interconnected formal gardens - some practical, some purely for pleasure.  It was a delight to wander about and really are worth a visit in their own right.  The herbaceous borders were amazing even though we were there past peak season.  I particularly loved the combinations of hot pinks, reds and oranges with blues.  There is a greenhouse too and a fantastical tempietto that references the 'primitive hut' as described by the French Neo-classical architectural theorist the Abbe Laugier. Delightful.

     The stables, constructed of brick and the local carstone, are perhaps one of the orangiest building I've seen. They are the work of William Kent, and with all Kent's buildings the Baroque, in the form of Sir John Vanbrugh, is never far away.  They are also very monumental, and form the beginning of the route that visitors take to enter the house.  It is possible to omit the stables from the route by walking around them but I'd advise against it. The route is so carefully contrived and baroque you have to do it all. Go through the archway nearest the walled garden and the car park, cross the courtyard (or get way laid in the cafe and shop) and through the arch opposite.  On the other side is a bosquet of densely planted lime trees - take the path.  At the centre a tall sundial, ahead a flight of stone stairs.  
     At the top of the steps you find yourself on the edge of a plateau, a vast Baroque garden that is part original (though most of the original planting was swept away in the 1770s to save money), part Picturesque remodelling and part subsequent restoration of the original plan.  The Baroque predominates. Walk on through the loose planting of trees and then all of sudden this amazing space opens up before you.  Breathtaking.  A real coup du theatre. The scale is colossal, and beyond my limited talents with a camera.

      Essentially an immense rectangle in plan this deeply formal and austere garden (there are no flowers) is bounded on one side (E - to your right) with the house and its flanking pavilions, and on the other three sides by ha-has and terraces.  A great lawn - bloody enormous, actually - runs from the house along the great E-W axis. (To your left) It is lined with double rows of pleached lime trees, echoing in their bare trunks the columns of the arcades that link the house to its pavilions. The lawn appears to have no end - the ha-ha dissolving the boundary at that point between garden and park.  The avenue of trees shown in 'Vitruvius Britannicus' has been removed at some point but the Baroque concept of 'infinite extension' assiduously maintained by the subsequent informal planting.  Behind the lines of pleached trees on either side of the lawn are blocks of bosquets sliced through by radiating avenues and bounded by hedges of either beech or hornbeam.  I wasn't sure which.  Four of the bosquets north of the lawn are hollowed out to form 'cabinets du verdure', in reference to those illustrated in the 'Vitruvius Britannicus', and where Modern sculpture and installations have been sited.  Rachel Whiteread had made a cast of the interior of a garden shed - 'Bit of a one trick pony' said the bf.  It was hard to disagree.  It was pretty underwhelming, as were the rest with the exception of 'Skyspace', 2000, by James Turrell.  (Apologies for ending this post on such a mildly negative note.  Everything else at Houghton though is marvellous!)