Lavender's Blue: Raising the amazing to a stellar stratosphère

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.

Beautiful as a Story

“Architectural fashion is so often a reaction to what went immediately before. There’s even a perceptible difference between the father A W Pugin and the son E W Pugin’s work. The second generation architect’s designs are more rationalised,” believes artist and architectural publisher Anne Davey Orr. “Later, the use of concrete in the 20th century would issue in a much more open expression of materials and structure.”

The penultimate decades of the last two centuries both stuck to something of a “more is more” mantra. A sort of turn of the century syndrome. Eclecticism gone wild. Not without honour and slightly mad. Pont Street for the 1880s and 90s; Postmodernism for the 1980s and 90s. Out went conformity and goodbye to context; in came variety and hello to contrast. It was the ever inventive cartoonist Osbert Lancaster who came up with the name Pont Street Dutch due to the style flourishing in Chelsea. It could easily have been North German Revival, Flemish Revival or New Queen Anne. Or even Hans Town or Cadogan. Sir John Betjeman abbreviated it to Pont Street, making it even more geographically precise. He calls it the “new built red as hard as the morning gaslight” in his poem The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel. These days the SW postcodes are as golden as they are terracotta.

That’s the name explained but who invented the style? Architect John James Stevenson claimed Queen Anne as his creation. The practice Ernest George and Harold Peto produced some of the most overblown examples in Harrington Gardens but really the style was to become synonymous with the dominating work of Norman Shaw. Pont Street rang the death knell, scrawled the writing on the wall, beckoned the banshee for regular terraces, heralding an asymmetric age of individualism. “Look at me, look at me!” screams each house as the rooflines tipsily whoosh and swoosh over more Dutch gables than Keizersgracht. Against the navy canvas of a sun drenched winter’s morning, and to be repeated nine years later on a sun drenched summer’s morning, the red brick dressed with white stone renders Pont Street a patriotic tricolour.

Such strength of character allows 20th century blips such as the picture window spanning the penthouse of 41 Lennox Gardens to be immersed into the wider townscape. The houses celebrate their birthdays: “1884” shouts 25 Lennox Gardens from metre tall letters on its third floor. A few doors up, 43 Lennox Gardens announces to the world it’s a year younger. A wander in wonder along the streets of SW1 and SW3, the blessed boulevards of the Cadogan Estate, throws up a maximalist impure visual feast, an aesthetic eyeful, for the devil and angels are in the detail.

At a glance, here are some of the hyperactive highlights. Keyhold silhouette broken pediment copper domes in Sloane Gardens. Double decker dormers in Culford Gardens. Witch’s hat copper turrets where Draycott Place meets Blacklands Terrace. Quoined porthole windows peering out of 54 to 58 Draycott Place. A neo Elizabethan fretwork loggia hugging 3 Cadogan Gardens. Pierless Brighton balconies clinging onto 85 to 87 Cadogan Gardens. A château mansard atop 89 Cadogan Gardens. Twin Queen Anne fanlights surmounting the doorcase of 105 Cadogan Gardens. Stumpy Ionic pilasters holding up egg and dart capitals framing the porch of 60 Cadogan Square. A pair of ballsy busty bulbous oriel windows on the side elevation of 63 Cadogan Square. And that’s just at a glance.

Pont Street the address bisects Cadogan Place Gardens under the watchful eyes of the 18 storeyed 1961 Jumeirah Carlton Tower. But the great swathe of red is mostly found between Sloane Street and Lennox Gardens. The extremities of Pont Street dive back into stuccoland. A morning of architectural investigation must be balanced by an afternoon of gourmet indulgence. Historically, afternoon tea was the outcome of dinner slipping to beyond 7pm by the opening years of the 19th century. Hiccupping ladies at first surreptitiously downed tea and gobbled cake in their boudoirs after midday. By 1842, trailblazing trendsetting taboo busting gal about castle Anna Maria Russell, 7th Duchess of Bedford, was bolshily dispensing tea in her sitting room to fill the gap created by the evening meal becoming later and later thanks to gaslighting. Fast forward to the Pont Street era and both sexes were merrily letting rip into cucumber sandwiches and scones with clotted cream in the drawing room or on the lawn. Where better then to indulge than 11 Cadogan Gardens, the hotel launched by the eponymous Estate in 2012? A Darjeeling fuelled calorific high awaits: Carrot Cake Explosion; Chocolate Fudge Bar; Lemon Drizzle Loaf; Macarons; Raspberry Orange Battenburg.

The first part of the hotel’s name is mildly misleading: the reception rooms and 54 bedrooms are spread across four townhouses (“5, 7, 9 and 11 Cadogan Gardens” being something of a mouthful). Bright red brick with white trimmings, in some places to stripy effect (more bands than a 12th of July march); terracotta tracery and scrolls; rusticated Doric columns and shortened Ionic columns; rectangular metal balconies and semicircular brick balconies; windows of every frame and shape and type (more casements than a West Belfast cemetery; and again more sashes than a 12th of July march) and orientation (more than a Pride march in London); oriels, chamfered bays and rectangular bays; flat, round arched and segmental arched windows; mini, Dutch and swan neck gables; 11 Cadogan Gardens is as dynamic Pont Street as it gets. The last part of the hotel’s name is wildly accurate. It faces a densely treed green square. The only two London members of the exclusive Relais et Châteaux group are 11 Cadogan Gardens and its sister hotel further round the square, The Chelsea Townhouse.
The interior is just as eclectic. A maze of lacquered cloistered sequestered panelled hallways and lobbies and corridors and passageways leads into the consciously picturesque opalescent Drawing Room. Starched linen at the ready, afternoon tea awaits, designed to instil a divine inertia into the remainder of a stimulating day. Decked and bedecked, espaliered and jardinièred, the Terrace is tucked between the townhouses and the mews. Alive with remote anticipation, it’s a place to dwell on the meaningfulness of life. Another surprising place is the Versailles inspired Mirrored Hall, a space designed to contemplate the advantage of beauty. Monochromatic photographs of supermodels line the descending staircase to the basement gym. Oil paintings of aristos line the ascending staircase to the bedrooms. Souls of different ages bordering the universe in process of consummation. This hotel has a distinct and dynamic personality, one that is warm and sensuous.

Over to the father of town planning Manning Robertson of Huntington Castle, County Carlow, for some pontification on not just Pont Street but classification itself. Everyday Architecture, 1948, “Definitions of architecture are as unsatisfactory as any other expositions of the aim and meaning of the arts; but if architecture is to be alive at all it must clearly involve the erection of buildings to suit the demands of the period, and the embellishment of those buildings according to the dictates of the materials in use, the treatment being a direct reflection of the outlook of the epoch, based of course upon past work, insofar as it is applicable. We cannot say that the 19th century, which produced principally a dead copying of the past, did not reflect itself truly; it was, on the contrary, amazingly accurate in illustrating that the worship of material prosperity is not consistent with a high level of art.”

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