Stowe Gardens
One of Capability Brown’s earliest works, Stowe Gardens in Buckinghamshire was looking at its best when Brian Spencer visited it during a recent autumn break. The gardens of Grade 1 listed Stowe House are the idyllic setting for Stowe School. The public school sits at the top of rising ground overlooking grounds that are, as the master gardener Capability Brown probably said, now looking at their best, having matured over three centuries. Our visit coincided with the sturdy beeches being decked in colours ranging from varying shades of yellow to brightest orange; their fallen leaves made patterns on the still waters of ornamental ponds dug by the hands of eighteenth century navvies. The original estate was built by Sir George Gifford (1498-1557) whose wealth was based on wool. Very early in the fortunes of Stowe, the place became a popular venue for visits of the great and the good. This interest prompted later owners to expand the garden, making it an ideal retreat for politicians looking for somewhere to meet and plot with their confrères, and maybe meet up with their lady friends on the odd occasion. Throughout the years the different owners all seem to have been able to extend the work of their predecessors, bringing in the top architects and garden designers of their day. Throughout the 1700s the house and its grounds were a hive of activity, starting with architects of their day, such as Charles Bridgeman and then Sir John Vanbrugh, designer of Blenheim Palace. He worked on Stowe for six years until his sudden death in 1726 and was followed by James Gibbs whose speciality was the English Baroque style – a feature that shows itself in both the house and the garden’s stone-work. Most gardeners will agree that gardens take time to develop. In the case of Stowe, the time lapse was decades, almost running into centuries. Most of the work on Stowe Gardens took place in the mid-1700s. It was during this time that the young Lancelot Brown who had moved to Buckinghamshire as a free-lance garden designer, came to the notice of Lord Cobham at Stowe. He became head gardener, working closely with James Gibbs the architect responsible for the house and William Kent who had already laid out features such as the Elysian Fields, Temple of Ancient Virtue and also the Temple of English Worthies. It was while Brown was developing Stowe’s gardens that he developed the style which was to give him the nickname ‘Capability’. Continuing Kent’s work, he laid out the garden making it look as natural as possible, in what became known as the Serpentine, or English style. As can be seen at Stowe, the central features are inter-linked winding, or ‘serpentine’ lakes joined by bridges and cascades; all this is surrounded by follies, encircling carriage drives and clumps of trees. All of his work has now grown to maturity, confirming Brown’s opinion of the garden’s ‘capability’. It was during Capability Brown’s tenure at Stowe that his ideas and skills came to the notice of the fashionable elite of the country and so in 1751 he left Lord Cobham’s employment at Stowe, to spend the rest of his working life advising the owners of great estates of the ‘capabilities’ of their properties. At the zenith of its popularity, Stowe became the ideal meeting place where politicians came to unwind and discuss strategies with their fellow MPs. Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger rented the estate at one time, making it an early version of Chequers the grace and favour residence of future prime ministers. Like many grand houses and their estates, Stowe has passed its usefulness as a place where the great and good of society could use their wealth. Due to escalating maintenance costs, Stowe had to be found other uses. The result was that the house became a public school and the gardens given over to the care of the National Trust. While the house and the school’s sports facilities are not open to the public, visitors can stroll round the gardens and parkland on any day of the year. Like visitors from earlier times, the entrance to the 750 acre estate and its 40 listed historic monuments and temples is past the imposing Corinthian Arch and the Oxford Gates; the latter incidentally are built of wrought iron salvaged from a World War One German battleship. Long before Stowe gardens became a National Trust property, the then current owners realised that it was necessary to provide somewhere for visitors to stay, or at least rest and take some refreshment. The New Inn close by the entrance was built to provide this and it now serves as an entry and information point at the start of a tour round the gardens. Although no longer providing overnight accommodation it does offer excellent meals and light refreshments, all to the usual high standards of the National Trust. The New Inn also houses a useful information section where, along with a note detailing the birds currently seen around the grounds, as well as being the start of walks guided by experienced National Trust staff. The short Bell Drive leads down to the start of the graded paths that meander over the gently sloping land on either side of the lakes and past monuments and temples. Children are well catered for with the choice of three walks, non-more than 1.3 miles in length. Even for adults, a walk around the garden need not be too exhausting; the following is just one of the strolls on offer and because we did it on our visit, we can say it was most enjoyable. 00
Places of Interest on Either Side of The Lower Wye & Severn Valleys
Beyond Birmingham and before reaching Bristol on the way to the south west, travellers using the M5 gateway to the sun often find themselves in one of the all too frequent bottlenecks, especially around the M5/M60 junction. If they give up and decide to call it a day around Junction 9 (Tewksbury), then the possibility of a completely new experience will make itself known. Assuming the tired motorist has left the motorway at Junction 9 on the M5, it will be a matter moments for him or her to reach Tewkesbury, a town on the Severn steeped in medieval history. In pre-motorway days the journey through this ancient place could be a nightmare of cars and lorries crawling like noisy, fume-spewing snails along the A38. How the half-timbered houses stood up to the vibration is a miracle, but they did and we must be more the grateful for it. One of the fifteenth-century houses has been converted into a Baptist chapel. It hides down a narrow alley near the abbey church, safe from the noise of traffic still using the A38, making it a haven of tranquility on even busy market days. On a sunny day in May 1471, the Battle of Bloody Meadow, part of the Wars of the Roses took place a couple of hundred yards from Tewksbury abbey. The last of the battles between the warring houses, it was won by the Yorkists who pursued the defeated Lancastrians along what became the A38. Many of the survivors took sanctuary inside the abbey, but were dragged out and publicly executed in the main street. While the abbey church is much changed from that awful time, it managed a century or so later to withstand the officials of Henry VIII who had come to close the place down as part of the Dissolution. Today, because the abbey was part parish church it was allowed to survive, one of the few buildings to remain from the conflict between monarch and church.  Further along the M5 turning off at Junction 11 will give the opportunity of visiting two attractive places. Gloucester is, as the name suggests, a Roman town, just one of the in-places popular with our sophisticated invaders. This part of the Severn valley and the nearby Cotswolds’ gentle hills had as its residents the early equivalent to early retired Prime Ministers and sacked petrol heads. For centuries the city guarded the lowest crossing of the Severn and routes into South Wales. It became the Roman fortified town of Glevum after taking over the British Caer Glowe; the Normans walled it and built a castle (destroyed in the 17th century). A busy coaching stop in Regency times, the glory of today’s city are its inns and the Cathedral; built mainly in the 12th century as a monastic church, but refounded by Henry VIII as a cathedral. As a hint of its age, the pillars supporting the main fabric, are all of 900 years old, and the glass of its huge east window has seen the dawn and dusk of over six hundred years. In Northgate Street, the 15th century ‘New Inn’ has a galleried courtyard where crowds could safely watch coach-horses being changed. Until quite recently, Gloucester was a busy inland port and the riverside wharfs can still be explored. On the opposite side of the motorway, the A40 leads into Cheltenham. What was once a small village quickly became a popular Regency spa when heavily charged water was found in a farmer’s field. The water is still dispensed in the Town Hall. Well known for its Gold Cup steeplechase horse racing every March and the home of an important girls’ public school, Cheltenham’s town centre is still lined with exquisite Regency buildings on either side of its wide streets. A wealth of trees preserves the character of this beautiful town despite the pressure of modern commerce. No shopping street in England can compare with the Promenade for beauty. The town has many links with music festivals – Gustav Holst was born here; concerts are given in halls around the town as well as St Mary’s Parish Church where its magnificent Rose Window is an attractive distraction. Part of the small garden in front of Cheltenham’s Town Hall has at its centerpiece an Italianate fountain that never fails to delight passers-by of all ages. Behind and to one side, stands the statue of Edward Wilson who died on the return from the South Pole along with Captain Scott and the rest of the polar group. Touchingly, the statue of this Cheltenham man was made by Scott’s widow. Inside a small museum and art gallery close by the Town Hall, a small piece of notepaper within a display cabinet is often overlooked. Grubby it might be, it was found on Wilson’s body and was the last message he wrote to his wife. Still legible, it was obviously written in the knowledge that Wilson was dying, and from its phrases it was likely that his brave colleagues were already dead. Moving across the Severn Valley and into that of the Wye, two features are worth discovering by a first-time visitor. The first and arguably the most attractive is Tintern Abbey, one of the most beautiful Cistercian ruins in Britain. With the wooded hills of the lower Wye Valley all around, it gives an aura of tranquility unspoiled by the vandalism of Henry VIII’s struggle with the church. A much larger structure than at first glance on driving along the valley road, the abbey in its hey-day held hundreds of monks and pilgrims as well as those in need of hospitalization. Careful excavation over recent years has unearthed the ground-plan of many of the rooms needed to support ecclesiastical activity in the main section. The beautifully preserved ruins of Chepstow Castle still seems to guard access to the open Bristol Channel. In fact until the first Severn crossing bridge was built, Chepstow was the first town in Wales accessible to the
Derbyshires Lost Houses – Meynell’s House, Derby
Francis Meynell (1698-1768) was a member of what was, in the early eighteenth century, a younger branch of the great Derbyshire house of Meynell, recorded in the county as of knightly status from c. 1100. His father had an estate at Anslow in Staffordshire and property elsewhere in that county, but also set up as an apothecary in Derby, building himself, in the first years of Queen Anne a very fine town house immediately adjacent to the surviving house built by his friend Alderman William Franceys. The building, which was destroyed in 1935 to make way for a branch of Martin’s Bank, was without doubt by the same hand as its larger and rather grander next door neighbour, Alderman Franceys’s house of 1694. Although the architect is not known, both houses have very similar detailing, especially in respect to the first floor window surrounds. Indeed the upper storey surrounds are eared and contain rose paterae, a feature still to be found on the former Lloyd’s bank on the corner of Market Place and in Sadler Gate as well as the former George Inn (now Fould’s) a few doors up in Iron Gate, of 1691. Unlike Franceys’s House, Meynell’s three storey brick façade was articulated by a giant Corinthian order enclosing all five bays of windows, with an entrance to the shop part of the premises between bays one and two, and a carriage arch giving access to the family’s entrance and the yard behind, between bays three and four. A large scar in the tiles on the street front of the roof in a photograph of 1855 suggests that when built and until the mid-19th century, there was a row of dormer windows there lighting an attic Inside, the first floor contained two spacious rooms with fielded oak panelling, and entered through eight-panelled doors in muscular eared architraves. The staircase was a fine one, also in oak with two turned balusters per tread. Even the garden was of above average description, boasting a ‘pilastered summerhouse’, presumably a brick edifice built en-suite with the house.. At the time of the ’Forty-five, when Meynell and his family, faced with the imminent arrival of the Jacobite claimant in the shape of Bonnie Prince Charlie, forbore to join the Whig corporation in their flight to Nottingham, they found themselves host to Alexander Forbes, 4th Lord Pitsligo and his entourage. The words ‘Charming Kitty Bailey/Wm. Napier’ were found scratched by a diamond on the pane of a window. But any romantic tale of Jacobite romance it vitiated by the date below – 1747 – and by the absence of any Napiers from the roll of officers in the Highland army! Nevertheless, bearing in mind that ‘Bailey’ may be as mis-spelling of ‘Bayly’ a connection with Francis cousin’s and sometime Derby MP Thomas Bayly might reasonable be postulated. Francis Meynell, had been born at Anslow Park, was baptised at Rolleston, for Anslow is not a separate parish. He had been educated at Derby School and on his father’s death in 1727 inherited his modest landed estate in Anslow, making the Derby residence a true town house, as well as being the place of business, the shop portion being serviced on the ground floor. In their day, apothecaries were the nearest most people got to having a GP, and they were in consequence, the repository of much confidential information concerning their clients. Indeed, this fact is often used to explain why Henry Franceys, the apothecary next door (son of Alderman William), was allowed into the County Assemblies when in fact, not being a member of the gentry (unlike Meynell), he should have been restricted to the separate Borough Assemblies. More likely, Franceys got in because he had married a Harpur of Twyford Hall, and by chance more than intent, Francis Meynell had also married a Harpur, but in his case she was Jane, daughter of John Harpur of Littleover Old Hall, senior cousins to the Twyford branch. The next step up from being an apothecary in those days was to train as a surgeon, and in due time Francis Meynell’s son John (1726-1802) was duly articled in 1740 to a local surgeon and in 1747 – the year that next door neighbour Henry Franceys died, enabling Francis Meynell to take over most of his clientèle – he qualified and worked at first from the house alongside his father. In 1778 he was practising in London, despite having inherited the apothecary’s business in 1768, and married a cousin there, from whom his son Godfrey was eventually to inherit a large portion of the ancient Meynell Langley estate, which had gone out of the family in the fifteenth century. Thus with John in London, the business was run after 1768 by his brother Francis (1738-1825) from Rotten Row – as the area was then called, prior to the demolition of the houses opposite Meynell House in 1870-77. At some stage, this Francis retired, and there is no record of his two sons having succeeded him. The date was, in all probability 1796, for that is the date claimed as that of the initiation of their business by Thomas and James Storer, who took the building on and opened the shop part as a grocery. The section on the right of the ground floor they let off to Benjamin Smith, a hosier who was there for many years. In 1890, the Storer family sold the business to Giles Austin a west-countryman, who traded under his own name. He rebuilt the house, improving the shop façade, adding iron bratishing to the facia and installing a parapet centered by a pediment which read TEAS COFFEES/1796/AUSTIN & Co/GROCERIES which clearly indicates that he considered himself merely a continuator of the concern. In 1910, he moved out of the house itself, building a pleasant detached villa in a couple of acres of Village Street, Normanton-by-Derby called Homelands (later replaced by a large grammar school of the same name, now itself no more) and
