A Tale of Two Hamlets
The grand country estate of Buscot Park is flanked on Lechlade Road to the northwest by Buscot and to the southeast by Eaton Hastings. This pair of hamlets are as Cotswolds as it gets – full of ancient stone buildings in exquisitely pretty surroundings. Except they aren’t entirely ancient. Many of the houses date from the late 19th century and were built for the owner of Buscot Park, Sir Alexander Henderson. Their Tudoresque revivalist style gives the impression of being there a few centuries earlier.
Materials are mainly local Taynton stone for walls and roofs. Features are chamfered bays, mullioned windows, half dormers and full gables. Architects Sir Ernest George and Alfred Yeates created a contextual vernacular aesthetic for these estate workers’ dwellings. Professor Hilary Grainger is the acknowledged authority on the architecture of Sir Ernest George (1839 to 1922).
She says, “He was not only one of the most successful and prolific of late Victorian architects but also an etcher and watercolourist of great distinction. His office occupied a position of significance for some 40 years, with over 80 assistants and pupils, including Sir Edwin Lutyens, Herbert Baker, Edward Guy Dawber, Darcy Bradell and Stanley Adshead passing through its doors in Maddox Street London.” Hilary notes George partnered with Thomas Vaughan (1836 to 1875), Harold Peto (1854 to 1933) and Alfred Yeates (1867 to 1914). It was Ernest and Harold who invented Pont Street Dutch (to recoin Osbert Lancaster’s phrase), the style of the red brick Cadogan Estate London which is the address of 11 Cadogan Gardens Hotel and The Franklin Hotel.
Not all of Ernest’s protégés would approve of his oeuvre. Later in life, Sir Edwin Lutyens said with rolling eyes that his former boss was, “An architect who took each year three weeks holiday abroad and returned with overflowing sketchbooks. When called on for a project he would look through these and choose some picturesque turret or gable from Holland, France or Spain and round it weave his design.” Ernest’s continuing enjoyment of historicist styles must have looked old fashioned and derivative to the forward thinking Edwin in his latter years.
There’s at least one ancient stone building in Buscot. Or at least relatively ancient. Buscot Manor, owned by the National Trust who also owns the nearby Buscot Weir on the River Thames, dates from 1692. The five bay two storey with dormered attic symmetrical elevation overlooking the garden is quintessentially English. The equally symmetrical elevation overlooking the access to its grounds is just as charming. The past isn’t always a foreign country.
