Setting the World on Fire
It has the strongest axes since President XI ordered Daxing Airport Beijing to be precisely 40 kilometres north of the centre of the Forbidden City. Buscot Park is all about geometry from the central arch of the former stable block framing the fountain in the middle of the Walled Garden to the matching pavilions flanking the main house. All is calm, all is symmetrical, all is balanced. Most excitingly, the Pleasure Grounds fanning out to the east of the house are filled with vistas and eyecatchers. The visit comes about following the purchase of a 1931 tome on the work of Robert and James Adam from Michael Moon’s Bookshop in Copeland, Cumbria. It’s stamped Buscot Park, Faringdon, rousing curiosity. Does Buscot Park still exist? If so, is it worth visiting?
One of the eyecatchers is the tallest sundial in England. Over to craftsperson and stonemason Fergus Wessel, “I was asked by Lord Faringdon to make the Obelisk Sundial to go at the end of a sweeping walk in the grounds of Buscot Park. The obelisk was designed by Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. The obelisk has six faces of green slate with noduses made from bronze with gold plate. On each face I carved Egyptian hieroglyphs which represent six different things, namely the Queen, Morning, Noon, Afternoon, Evening and Eternity. I was given advice on these carvings by an Egyptologist from the British Museum.” Sir Mark is married to the landscape architect Lady Arabella Lennox-Boyd whose work includes the courtyard garden at Hôtel Le Bristol Paris.
The British Sundial Society’s Register of Fixed and Mass Dials describes the Obelisk Sundial: “Mounted on a hexagonal pyramidal base, it is five metres tall and made of Portland stone. The dial faces are of Broughton Moor green slate. The dials were delineated by Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd and carved by Fergus Wessel. Six dials are provided, allowing for both halves of the year – days getting longer, days getting shorter.” The Obelisk Sundial terminates the Egyptian Avenue which was completed in 2013. It’s actually at the centre of no fewer than five vistas announced by twin obelisks. Two rows of Chinese warriors make an unlikely appearance outside the Walled Garden.
Bordering these contemporary gardens is the early 1900s Peto Water Garden. This highly structured theatrical design cascades from below the east elevation of the house before entering the eight hectare Big Lake. The contrast between the two waterscapes is breathtaking. The current owner’s great grandfather, financier Alexander Henderson, bought the house and estate in 1889. He was created 1st Baron Faringdon in 1916. Alexander enlarged the 1780s house built by Edward Loveden (likely to the design of James Darley), adding a substantial visitors’ accommodation west wing and porch and dormers designed by Ernest George. He commissioned Ernest’s colleague Harold Peto to remodel the Pleasure Grounds including designing an Italianate garden based around pools and fountains. Harold also remodelled the forecourt.
The circular Swinging Garden is a contemporary insertion between the Peto Water Garden and the Pleasure Grounds. Its name comes from four timber swings surrounding Sycamore Seeds, a kinetic bronze sculpture designed by David Watkinson. The 2nd Baron Faringdon disliked flowers except for water lilies. This preference has largely been followed in recent years, except in the Walled Garden.
Lord and Lady Faringdon now live in a dower house tucked into a valley below the main house. Completed in 2004 at a cost of £2.7 million, Cowper Griffith Architects designed the new house in a Palladian form of central block with short links to flanking wings. Clapboard cladding lends it an American East Coast look. A view of the dower house is included in the painting by Ellen-Ann Hopkins hanging in the tearoom in the converted 18th century stable block.
Charles, 3rd Lord Faringdon, explains, “My father died when I was 16 and my mother lived abroad, so rather to his surprise, my bachelor uncle Gavin Faringdon suddenly found himself landed with a philistine nephew. I was passed around the family – particularly to him but also to his sister, both of whom I loved – for part of my holidays from Eton. Looking back, I was the personification of everything he most deplored but not for one moment did he make it obvious to me. Quite the reverse: he encouraged me to join in his house parties as an adult, provided I never fell asleep on the sofa.”
“My first visits to Buscot coincided with his most politically provocative period, when the house echoed loudest to the rhetoric of Nye Bevan and, later, to the economic theories of Balogh and Kaldor. Every weekend the house was crammed with politicians, painters and friends – sometimes in improbable combinations. I remember vividly when as Chairman of both Societies he had members of the Fabian Society staying and an unexpected busload of botanists from the St Paulia Society arrived for Sunday lunch. The conversation and the food were both in very short supply! The huge bath towels and delicious greenhouse peaches – both were white and warm – were so memorable. It was the same with his collecting. He never minded being unfashionable but he particularly liked the unusual. That went for his choice of furniture as well as friends.”
“In the 1940s Gavin had been responsible for the scheme that effectively handed the Buscot Park estate to the National Trust through businessman Ernest Cook, with a leaseback to the family of the house and grounds. In the 1950s and 1960s the idea of keeping the contents together and of improving and maintaining the Collection took hold, and an autonomous trust was set up with entailed family heirlooms later added. Subsequent endowments have made it possible for the present trustees of the Faringdon Collection to continue to add to it, building on the core established by my great grandfather while being free to put the Collection on public display wherever they choose. A legacy to the Collection in the 1990s allowed the trustees to restore my uncle’s London home in Brompton Square and to open it to the public.”
“Since 1977 when my wife and I came to live at Buscot Park after my uncle’s death we have accumulated a small collection of contemporary paintings and silverware. Any reservations you may have about the internal colour schemes, the changes in the Walled Gardens or the way we open the property must be laid fairly and squarely at my door and not that of the National Trust. The Trust plays no part in the day to day running of Buscot Park nor on the vermilion reds or the germolene pinks we may choose. As a family we endeavour to maintain a country house setting for the Faringdon Collection within the framework of the National Trust that will appeal to those who want to be spared the depressing conformity and bloodless feeling of so many houses now open to the public. Each generation has a duty to breathe life into a property, to enliven it and to adapt it to meet changing circumstances, tastes and technology.”
It’s hard not to still agree with Clifford Musgrave’s description in The Connoisseur, October 1965: “Altogether Buscot Park is an astonishing instance of a house in which the best original elements have been preserved, restored and heightened. The interior further presents decoration and furnishing that crystallise the highest inspiration of their age, with additions of remarkable works of art of the Renaissance and Victorian ages, in surprising but harmonious juxtaposition, combined with some distinguished creations of our own era.”
Born in 1902, Gavin Henderson, 2nd Baron Faringdon, would fall in with a set of vibrant partyers as a student at Oxford. His circle included writers Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. Evelyn would immortalise some of their mutual friends in his 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited. Harold Acton and Brian Howard merged into the witty character Anthony Blanche. Hugh Lygon became the winsome Sebastian Flyte. Irish businessman Brendan Bracken was the inspiration for Canadian businessman Rex Mottram. It was the era of fops and cads and pansies performing hijinks. His bachelor party at the Phyllis Tennis Club in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, on 1 June 1927, was very Bright Young Things. Four days after the event, the Daily Mail published a piece memorably titled “Setting the Thames on fire”:
“Mr Gavin Henderson, who was married to Lord Kylsant’s daughter on Thursday, gave a bachelor party to about 30 friends at the Phyllis Court Club on Wednesday night. The young men arrived in motorcars and before dinner ordered 20 gallons of petrol in buckets. After dinner the petrol was thrown into the river and matches were thrown into it. The petrol caught fire and the flames leapt up the Cromwellian wall, burning off the roses … When the fire had died down the young men returned to their cars and went back to town.”
“Lady Violet and Lady Kylsant were a forceful alliance,” Roger Vlitos records in Gavin Faringdon Portrait of a Rebel Peer (2022), “The young couple were caught in a maternal pincer movement from which there seemed to be no escape.” Gavin’s marriage to Honor Phillips lasted six weeks and was annulled four years later. He never married again. A 1935 Walter Sickert painting hanging in the Staircase Hall captures him wearing a dapper shiny suit.
From socialite to socialist.
In contrast to his Conservative family background, Gavin joined the Labour Party and sat as a peer in the House of Lords. He was an active supporter of the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War, donating his Rolls Royce to be converted into a makeshift ambulance. Gavin housed 40 child refugees fleeing Francisco Franco’s forces in Buscot Park cottages. Exempted from fighting during World War II due to his pacifist position, he served in London and Bristol Fire Brigades. Postwar, he sat on London County Council and campaigned for the preservation of Georgian architecture.
Buscot Park is filled with his art collection. Sir Anthony van Dyke, Rembrandt, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Peter Paul Rubens and Bartolomé Murillo all make appearances. And his furniture collection: Robert Adam and Thomas Hope provide interior highlights, the latter triggering an Egyptian theme that would come to fruition in the latest landscapes. The 1st Lord Faringdon was also an art collector, installing an Edward Burne-Jones series of paintings The Legend of the Briar Rose as an eye level frieze in the Saloon.
Clifford Musgrave, once Director of the Royal Pavilion Brighton, was an expert on Thomas Hope: “Here at Buscot in an appropriate setting is found what is probably the most important surviving group of Thomas Hope’s furniture in existence. This is the Egyptian sofa and a pair of armchairs – all mounted with bronze figures of couchant lions, seated Egyptian figures and canopic vases – that once furnished the Egyptian Gallery at Duchess Street, and were later, about 1825, moved to Deepdene, Hope’s house near Dorking in Surrey.”
Gavin shaved off the architectural accretions of the previous generation, returning the house to a spare late 18th century appearance. The removal of the squashed looking porch was a particular triumph. The slimmest of pedimented projections (with a porthole below its peak) enlivens the south facing entrance front; a pair of deep bows is well placed for capturing a parkland panorama on the north front.
In the 1930s Gavin commissioned Charles Hyslop to design a pair of outlying pavilions to flank the main house. They have identical form – double height temple front ended – but the western pavilion has more windows. It was built as servants’ accommodation and is now National Trust offices. The eastern pavilion is a theatre and indoor squash court. An arch in the western pavilion leads through to a lawn abutting the side elevation of the main house. An arch in the eastern pavilion provides access to an outdoor swimming pool. The lawn and swimming pool are sheltered by tall clipped hedgerows. Charles also designed a forecourt sweeping out to a haha.
External window blinds: practical on a south facing façade with aesthetic worth of neoclassical rationalisation.
Philanthropist Ernest Cook was grandson of Thomas Cook who invented package holidays. He bought the estate in 1948 as part of a carefully structured conservation strategy agreed with Gavin and the National Trust. As Lord Faringdon has explained, Ernest acted as a benevolent financial bridge allowing the family to stay in their ancestral home while legally locking in long term preservation under the protection of the National Trust.
Lord and Lady Faringdon’s oldest son James Henderson now lives in the main house with his wife Lucinda and their three children. He explains, “My parents live on the estate as well in a smaller very comfortable house. They are still overseeing the gardens – their great passion. We love hosting dinner parties, especially when we can follow them with a concert in our little theatre. We’re always looking for ways to expand and enrich the Collection. We also want to develop new routes through the woods and the park so that visitors can enjoy the grounds all year round. We would love for future generations to be able to enjoy it here even more than we do now.”
First and lasting impressions of Buscot Park are of a country house and estate in their prime, greatly developed in the last two centuries. Looking bright, if burnt, in the fifh heatwave of the season. The avenue is flanked by a pair of ashlar gatelodges: the westernmost a 1930s remodelling of a 1780s building; the easternmost, built to match in the 1930s. Charles Hyslop’s design is pure timeless neoclassicism. The principal elevations appear single storey while the elevations facing away from the avenue reveal both gatelodges to be two storey. Their Georgian appearance (main house maquettes) along Lechlade Road contrasts with the Tudor Revival houses of the nearest hamlets: Buscot and Eaton Hastings. Little Lake lies to the southeast of the gatelodges and is a foretaste of the bucolic landscapes to come.
Buscot Park still exists; it’s worth visiting.
