Painswick, Gloucestershire

Cotswold Rococo

In 1984 Lord and Lady Dickinson, owners of the Painswick House estate, decided to restore the 18th-century garden in a hidden valley behind the house. The area had been neglected for years, the garden abandoned, and part of the site eventually made over to a commercial conifer plantation. Restoration meant clearing decades of rubbish, working out what remained of the original structures, no doubt uprooting any remaining conifers, and repairing (and sometimes reconstructing) garden buildings. This was a huge undertaking and would have been impossible were it not for a painting (and drawings) of the garden in its mid-18th century prime by local artist Thomas Robins.

What has emerged over the decades since 1984 is a garden in the Rococo taste, with walks, pools, vistas, a wooded glade, a kitchen garden, a vineyard, planting with species available in the 18th century, and numerous pavilions and other architectural structures. Some of the buildings were restored to something close to their 18th-century state, some were rebuilt completely following the Robins pictures, for some a compromise was achieved, with certain structures restored to a state similar to the way they were in the 19th century.

One of the most striking buildings is the Red House, which sits at one end of the garden, at a point where formal beds and clipped hedges give way to a riot of natural vegetation and wild flowers. It is not only a belter of an eyectacher, but also exemplifies some of the key features of the Rococo. These are: asymmetry, the interesting use of colour, scrolls and curlicues, rich ornamentation, playfulness, and eclecticism of style (the building owes much to Gothic, but the roofline of the right-hand room takes a concave form derived from Chinese sources). This building of the 1740s adopts a fancy and fanciful kind of Gothic detailing with an ogee (double-curved) gable, deep cusped ogee canopies to windows and doorway, large finials, upside-down trefoil-shaped openings, exaggerated buttress-like stone uprights with concave-slopes to the gables. This is similar to the kind of Gothic used by Horace Walpole at his Twickenham house, Strawberry Hill, at around the same time as the Rococo Garden was begin constructed.

A further Rococo feature of the Red House is the way in which the two wings are set at a slight angle, another piece of asymmetry that seems odd until one realises that the two rooms face two different paths that converge here, one leading along the edge of the garden, the other heading towards its centre. So whichever path you take to approach the Red House, one of its wings acts as a focal point: the building is ingeniously integrated into the plan of the garden.

Painswick Rococo Garden, as it’s now known, is a unique example of a Rococo garden in England. To those interested in architecture, it offers half a dozen small delights like the Red House. For those whose main interest is the horticultural side of things, the place is stunning in the snowdrop season (it has one of the best collections of snowdrops anywhere), delightful in the late spring when we visited (though we were a little late to see the bluebells at their best), and its wooded sections must be beautiful in autumn too. But the point is not to separate buildings and plants, but to appreciate how well they are integrated. The effect is a triumph of 18th-century design and 20th-century restoration.

Shugborough, Staffordshire

Chinoiserie

I might have given the impression in my recent post about the 18th-century garden buildings at Shugborough that the dominant style of these structures was the Greek revival idiom developed by James 'Athenian' Stuart. While it's true that there are memorable Greek revival buildings at Shugborough –  a Doric temple and a building based on the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates as well as the Tower of the Winds that I posted – this is not the whole story. Just when you think you have the place worked out, you come across this: the Chinese House.

This small pavilion of c. 1747, carefully set on a low mound near water, has the concave curving roof, pagoda-like finial, and patterned glazing bars that mark it out straight away as a building in the Chinese taste. It was originally painted blue and set on an island flanked by two bridges, but the layout of the terrain was altered after flooding in 1795. When first built it was not the only Chinese building in the garden: there was also a pagoda, which is long gone – it was apparently destroyed in the 1795 floods.

1747 is quite early for a Chinese-style building in England – the famous pagoda in Kew Gardens, designed by Sir William Chambers, was completed in 1762. Shugborough owes this early Chinese structure in part to Commodore (later Admiral) George Anson, the younger brother of Thomas Anson, the owner of the house. George Anson made a fortune by capturing a Spanish galleon loaded with gold and silver; he had also visited China.

There is a lot more about the Chinese buildings at Shugborough on the East India Company at Home website and the National Trust Treasure Hunt blog. Both of these point out the paradox that the Admiral who provided much of the money to create Shugborough and its gardens didn't much like the Chinese or their taste. They suggest the possibility that George's wife, Elizabeth, was the family member most closely involved with the Chinese House. Chinoiserie, apparently, was an area of decorative design that found many female enthusiasts in the 18th century: perhaps Shugborough's Chinese House is an example of this feminine influence.

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I include links to posts from the National Trust Treasure Hunt blog in Historic Buildings Round-up, my daily digest of news from the around the web.

Birmingham

Desirable alien (2)

In contrast to the British ‘alien’ of a few posts back, my other urban invader really is from overseas. It began life, of course, in China, and was donated to the city by the Wing Yip Company (Britain’s foremost Chinese grocer) in 1998 as a ‘thank you’ to Birmingham, the place where its business became prosperous. It enlivens a roundabout in the city’s inner ring road.

The Chinese pagoda was carved in Fujian. The granite structure was then shipped to Britain in sections and the whole thing was assembled on site. At 40 feet high, it is impressive, and, unlike the Pevsner City Guide to Birmingham, which finds it ‘gloomy’, I think it cheers up its busy roundabout. It makes is effect in spite of being dwarfed by the tall office and hotel buildings that cluster hereabouts, especially the partly pale blue Beetham Tower which, with its 36 storeys faced in glass panels, is something of an alien presence itself.

I like the way our cities can throw up such surprising bits of decoration – surprising, but not entirely random, because the pagoda stands near the city’s Chinese quarter. It’s good that even places that have been so busily modernized and remodernized as Birmingham continue to make us raise our eyebrows in this way. And that a roundabout has been thought about, for once.