The Great Country Estates of Britain Series. Part Five: Wrest Park

Wrest Park is a the country seat of the de Grey family, and is located outside Silsoe, Bedfordshire. The present house was built in 1834-39, to designs by its owner the Thomas de Grey, 2nd Earl de Grey.

De Grey was the eldest son of Thomas Robinson (2nd Baron Grantham) and Mary Yorke (daughter of the 2nd Marchioness Grey). He succeeded his father as the third baron in 1786, and became the sixth baronet Robinson of Newby in 1792. In 1833 he succeeded his aunt as second Earl de Grey according to a special decree and also inherited Wrest Park.

He was an amateur architect and was the first president of the Royal Institute of Architects. He drew inspiration from French architecture, especially architects such as Jacques-Francois Blondel.

Wrest has some of the earliest Rococo revival interiors in the UK:

Above: The Stairs and main foyer
Below: The Library

Above: The Blue Drawing Room
Below: The Dining Room

Wrest Park Gardens are some of the grandest remaining examples of the early eighteenth century, are spread over 150 acres (607,000 m²). They were originally planned by George London and Henry Wise for Henry Grey (1st Duke of Kent). They were later remodelled by our favourite 18th century landscape garden proponent, Capability Brown (who, unlike in his remodelling of Blenheim Palace) kept the original parterres (modelled on Versailles).

A pavilion, originally a banqueting house, was designed in the baroque style by Thomas Archer in 1709 and was completed in 1711 having cost £1,809.

Above: Etching of Archer's Pavilion from Vitruvius Brittanicus (c.f. Photo below)

Below: Exterior of Archer's Pavilion

Below: Interior of Pavilion

During the later 18th and 19th centuries, the Bath House (designed by Edward Stevens or Thomas Wright, 1770), and marble fountains were added. The huge Orangery was built by Thomas de Grey.

From 1906 to 1911 Wrest Park was leased to the American Ambassador, Whitelaw Reid, during which time it was visited by King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and later Theodore Roosevelt.

Thomas Carew (1595-1640) wrote his poem 'To My Friend G.N. from Wrest' in 1639 that described the old house which was demolished between 1834 and 1840:

Such pure and uncompounded beauties bless

This mansion with an useful comeliness,

Devoid of art, for here the architect

Did not with curious skill a pile erect

Of carved marble, touch, or porphyry,

But built a house for hospitality;

No sumptuous chimney-piece of shining stone

Invites the stranger's eye to gaze upon,

And coldly entertains his sight, but clear

And cheerful flames cherish and warm him here:

No Doric nor Corinthian pillars grace

With imagery this structure's naked face,

The lord and lady of this place delight

Rather to be in act than seem in sight;

Instead of statues to adorn their wall

They throng with living men their merry hall,

Where at large tables filled with wholesome meats

The servant, tenant, and kind neighbour eats.

(lines 19-36)

Amalthea's horn

Of plenty is not in effigy worn

Without the gate, but she within the door

Empties her free and unexhausted store.

Nor, crowned with wheaten wreaths, doth Ceres stand

In stone, with a crook’d sickle in her hand:

Nor, on a marble tun, his face besmeared

With grapes, is curled Bacchus reared.

We offer not in emblems to the eyes,

But to the taste those useful deities.

We press the juicy god and quaff his blood,

And grind the yellow goddess into food.

(lines 57-68)

The old manor house was demolished when the present house was completed by 1839. It is set further north than the site of the old house, and new formal gardens were laid out between the mansion and the woodland garden. The Orangery, Italian Garden and Parterre with magnificent lead statues date from the 1830s.

Lily Allen shot the video for her song "The Fear" at Wrest Park (Rumoured to have cost 50,000 GBP!).

The Polo...

The Saturday just gone Peter and I went with some friends to see the New Zealand vs England Polo Match. It was great fun. The weather held out (it seems to be raining almost everywhere except the polo ground). We sat and drank champers and had gorgeous little nibbley things and watched them have a few chukkas, getting quite excited when the two teams went thundering past us. It was a close game, New Zealand winning by a narrow margin during the last chukka.

The History of Polo (an abridged version)

Polo is thought to have originated in China and Persia around 2,000 years ago. The name of the game may well come from the word “pholo” meaning 'ball' or 'ballgame' in the Balti language of Tibet.

Tang court playing Polo.jpg

"Polo players at their game", detail on the west wall of a tomb pathway of Prince Zhang Huai's tomb, interred in 706 AD during the Tang Dynasty of China. The tomb is part of the larger Qianling Mausoleum near modern-day Xi'an (formerly Chang'an, the Tang capital).

The first recorded game took place in 600BC between the Turkomans and Persians (the Turkomans won). In the fourth century AD, King Sapoor II of Persia learned to play, aged seven. In the 16th century, a polo ground (300 yards long and with goalposts eight yards apart) was built at Ispahan, then the capital, by Shah Abbas the Great.

The Moguls were largely responsible for taking the game from Persia to the east and, by the 16th century, the Emperor Babur had established it in India. (It had already long been played in China and Japan, but had died out by the time the West came in contact with those countries). In the 1850s, British tea planters discovered the game in Manipur (Munipoor) on the Burmese border with India. They founded the world’s first polo club at Silchar, west of Manipur. Other clubs followed and today the oldest in the world is the Calcutta Club which founded in 1862.

Malta followed in 1868 because soldiers and naval officers stopped off there on their way home from India. In 1869, Edward “Chicken” Hartopp, of the 10th Hussars, read an account of the game in The Field magazine while stationed at Aldershot and, with fellow officers, organised the first game. Then known as “hockey on horseback,” it was played on a hastily-rolled Hounslow Heath where a shortlist of about 10 rules was also hastily assembled.

But, it was John Watson (1856-1908), of the 13th Hussars, who formulated the first real rules of the game in India in the 1870s. He later formed the celebrated Freebooters team who won the first Westchester Cup match in 1886. He was a key player at the All Ireland Polo Club which was founded in 1872 by Horace Rochfort of Clogrenane, County Carlow.

The first polo club in Britain was Monmouthshire, founded in 1872 by Captain Francis Herbert (1845- 1922), of the 7th Lancers, at his brother's estate at Clytha Park, near Abergavenny. Others, including Hurlingham, followed quickly.

In 1876 polo was introduced to the USA by James Gordon Bennett Junior who had seen the game at Hurlingham during a visit to England.

The NZ vs UK International

Above: The NZ Team arriving

Below: Taking to the field

Some individual pictures:

The Hurley Burley:

And of course, there is the famous tradition of the stomping of the divots at half time (although the field was so well maintained that people were almost fighting over finding them!)

Above: Peter and our friends.

Below: Yours Truly, trying to find a divot.

Some video clips from the match...

The most prestigious polo club in the world is Guards. It is where the glitterazzi go to see and be seen during the season, and is the regular haunt of the young royals. The Club was founded on 25th January 1955 with HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, as President. Originally named the Household Brigade Polo Club, the name was changed to its present form in 1969. Since inception the Club has grown considerably and it is now the largest polo club in Europe in terms of membership and number of grounds.

There are currently about 1,000 non-playing members and about 160 playing members, among whom are some of the highest rated players in the world. Approximately 25 per cent of the players are overseas visitors from Europe, the Middle and Far East, North and South America, Australia and New Zealand. Around half of the playing members are professionals.

Within the Great Park at Windsor, the Club is set in the outstanding natural surroundings of Smith's Lawn, which is thought to have been named after a game keeper at the time of the Restoration in the 17th century.

There are 10 grounds extending over an area of some 130 acres. At nearby Flemish Farm, the Club has some 120 stables, an exercise track and a practice ground.

The Club's playing season starts in April and finishes in mid September. The premier official tournaments are the Queen's Cup (high goal), Royal Windsor (medium goal) and the Archie David (low goal), all of which take place in June. In July each year, the Club is host to the Hurlingham Polo Association's International Day- the great showpiece polo occasion of the year, at which attendance is regularly in excess of 20,000 people. The Club is also home to the Inter-Regimental in July, The Duke of Wellington Trophy in August and the Nations Cup in September.

The Orangery....

An Orangery was a building frequently found in the grounds of the des. res. from the 17th to the 19th centuries. It was usually constructed with a classical architectural form. The name reflects the original use of the building as a place where citrus trees were often wintered in tubs under cover, surviving through harsh frosts. At Versailles, the citrus was grown in large stone tubs which were to be moved out onto the adjacent terrace every morning after the frosts had gone, and back again every sun set. This was quite a feat, bearing in mind that there were thousands of trees in large stone pots to shift!

The orangery provided a luxurious extension of the normal season of a range of plants, and also to establish other varieties of tender plants, particularly exotics. During the 19-20 centuries, having fruits such as Bananas and Pineapples grown on one's estate to titillate one's guests with was the ultimate in certain social circles! An example of one such fixation was that of growing pineapples, where in Dunmore Park, Scotland, there was built a house especially dedicated to the growth of the pineapple, assisted by furnace driven heating, and fancifully designed with a pineapple-shaped cupola:

The Dunmore Pineapple (Wikipedia commons, attr. Kevin Rae)

The orangery originated from Italy during the renaissance, when glass-making techniques enabled sufficiently large expanses of clear glass to be produced. Orangeries became symbols of status among the wealthy and the aristocracy. Originally they were constructed with a standard roof of their period, i.e. slate or lead. Later glazed roofing, which afforded more sunlight to plants, became the norm (sometime during the early nineteenth century). The orangery at Dyrham Park, Gloucestershire, which had been provided with a slate roof when originally built in 1702, was given a glazed one about a hundred years later.

The Orangerie at the Palace de Louvre built in 1617, inspired imitations that were eventually trumped by Europe's largest orangery, that of Versailles. It was designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart for Louis XIV's 3000 orange trees at. It was not until eclipsed by any other glazed building until Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace:

The new "Hesperidean" garden Louis XIV commissioned Le Vau to create at Versailles, in imitation of Abel Servien's orangery at Meudon, indulged his customary delight, here as elsewhere, of offering all while giving nothing.

When first completed in 1664 the classic layout of the superb orange garden designed by Le Notre could be admired by all from the balustrade of the "parterre du Midi" or flower terrace.

Twenty years later the Orangery at Versailles was rebuilt and extended, revealing the king's intentions even more clearly. The new architect, Hardouin-Mansart, provided access to the garden by building the two monumental staircases known as the "One Hundred Steps", but surrounded the garden with high railings. Enclosed in this impressive "seraglio", access to the orange trees depended entirely on the goodwill of the king. Louis XIV - who in fact wrote a guide to the gardens entitled Maniere de montrer les Jardins de Versailles - would lead his courtiers across the orange garden, which stood empty in winter, to the Salon de lOrangerie, where they would gaze in wonder at this palace of oranges.

The king owed this extraordinary display to Jean-Baptiste de La Quintinie, who had been responsible for the fruit and vegetable gardens on the king's estates since 1670. Las Quintinie was appointed to Versailles in 1661 and between 1678 and 1683 worked with Hardouin-Mansart on the new royal kitchen garden; this gave him the opportunity to experiment with new methods of transplanting, managing, and pruning fruit trees. In winter the orangery, to which the container-grown plants from the various royal residences were brought, housed more than 3,000 trees including oranges, lemons, bays, pomegranates, and thorn apples.

Today, modern Orangeries take on many forms, from the more traditional, like that designed by Qinlan Terry, Below:

To the more modern:

At Willowbrook Park there will be a small orangery, like the one below, situated in the middle of the citrus grove, inside the orchard at the end of an avenue of Crab-apples:

More examples of glorious orangeries:

Ground floor: perfumery, stationery and leather goods, wigs and haberdashery, kitchenware and food... Going up.

Wouldn't it be wonderful to have an elevator with a chandelier and a sofa in it...

We are going to have to settle for something a little smaller, but still with a certain vintage charm...

Does anyone else remember...