Garsington Manor

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Garsington Manor, photograph by Henry Taunt , 1865
Panoramic photo of Garsington Manor, 2011

Garsington Manor is a manor house on the southern edge of the English town of Garsington , about six kilometers southeast of Oxford in the county of Oxfordshire . The English country house dates back to the 17th century and was hardly changed until the 1920s. Since June 1, 1984, it has been a Grade II * Listed Building under monument protection . The gardens are on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens .

The property gained particular fame as the country house owned by Ottoline and Philip Morrell, who met there with members of the Bloomsbury Group from 1915 onwards . From 1989 to 2010, on the initiative of the family of the banker and music lover Leonard Victor Ingrams , annual summer opera performances under the name of Garsington Opera took place on Garsington . After the event series has moved to Wormsley Park , the mansion and garden are only open to the public for rare National Garden Scheme (NGS) events .

history

The land on which Garsington Manor was built once belonged to Abingdon Abbey . From 1428 it was owned by Thomas Chaucer , son of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer , which is why it was named "Chaucers". Through his daughter Alice it came to her husband William de la Pole, Earl and Duke of Suffolk . But when Edmund de la Pole , a grandson of the couple, opposed the English King Henry VII at the beginning of the 16th century , he had Edmund's possessions - and thus Garsington - confiscated in 1504 .

In 1624/1625 William Wickham acquired the land and had the current manor house built around 1630. The Wickhams held the property for more than 150 years. Only during the English Civil War was the house temporarily occupied by Cromwell's troops. However, the Wickhams did not live in Garsington Manor themselves, but had it managed by tenants. After the death of Ann, the widow of another William Wickham, in 1783, her daughter Anne gave the property to her husband, Thomas Drake Tyrwhitt-Drake of Shardeloes, whom she had married in 1780. His family held the country estate until the 20th century, but they didn't manage it themselves either, but left it to tenants.

Members of the Bloomsbury Group while staying at Garsington Manor; v. l. from right: Ottoline Morrell, Maria Huxley, Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell (1915)

1913 acquired Philip Morrell and his wife Ottoline the property including 360  acres (about 146  hectares ) for 8400  pounds . They used it as a residence from the summer of 1915 and regularly invited numerous artists, writers and intellectuals, including members of the Bloomsbury Group , to their homes. Garsington Manor therefore developed into an asylum for pacifists and conscientious objectors at the same time during the First World War , because during their stays they officially worked on Garsington's farm and were released from military service for it. The Morells' guests included Leonard and Virginia Woolf , Siegfried Sassoon , Lytton Strachey , Bertrand Russell , Mark Gertler and Clive Bell . Aldous Huxley and DH Lawrence processed memories of Garsington Manor in their works A Society in the Country ( English Crome Yellow ) and Loving Women ( English Women in Love ). Lady Morrell and her husband hired the architect Philip Tilden to carry out the necessary repairs, extensions and changes to the manor house and the garden . For example, the loggia of the building and the formal Italian garden as well as the so-called Parterre , a flower garden east of the manor house, can be traced back to the couple.

The farm belonging to the house was not profitable, and in order to be able to pay off the increasing debts, the Morrells had to sell the property in May 1928. The new owner was the Oxford professor Trevor Heaton from Christchurch , who had some changes made. This included a single-storey extension with a kitchen and utility rooms on the west side of the manor house, as well as changes to the ground floor in the 1930s. During the Second World War , Garsington Manor was rented to the painter Thomas Lowinsky and his wife Ruth before it was acquired by Heaton's brother-in-law, John Wheeler-Bennett , in 1954 . His widow Ruth sold the system to the married couple Leonard and Rosalind Ingrams in 1982. Together with their gardener Peter John Prior , the two restored the manor's gardens in the style of the 1920s, before they began using Garsington as a stage for opera performances for four weeks each summer in 1989. What began as a fundraising event for the Bodleian Library in Oxford became known far beyond the borders of England under the name Garsington Opera . The event was based in Garsington for over 20 years before moving to Wormsley Park in 2011. In 2012 the property was temporarily on sale for £ 6.5million. The current owner is Susan Robinson.

description

The property consists of a manor house, farm buildings and approximately eleven acres (approximately 4.5  hectares ) of garden land .

Mansion

North side of the manor
Entrance gate

The Jacobean mansion is in the northern part of the property. From the street it is separated by a rectangular atrium, high on the east and west sides by six meters, cut in the form of yew hedges is limited. These are possibly over 200 years old. A wrought-iron gate between rusticated stone pillars from the late 17th or early 18th century gives access to the courtyard, in the middle of which there is a stone putti . They are joined by low stone walls in east and west that support a lattice fence. The mansion has a rectangular floor plan and two floors, which are closed by a pan-covered roof landscape. The core of it dates from around 1630, but was changed in the late 17th century, with a previously existing inner courtyard being built over. Its arched entrance is in the middle of the north facade.

The interior of the building has been changed several times, but some features such as paneling and chimneys from the 17th and 18th centuries have been partially preserved. There is a large foyer behind the main entrance. To the west is the dining room that was once the kitchen of the house. Other rooms in the 860 square meter ground floor are a living room ( English drawing room ), living room ( English sitting room ), an office / writing room, a kitchen and in 1926 built the loggia. There are five bedrooms and a library on the first floor, while another six bedrooms can be found on the top floor.

Farm and outbuildings

To the northwest of the manor house - beyond the yew hedge in the forecourt - there is an L-shaped utility wing from the 16th to 18th centuries, in which the brewery and the bakery were housed. To the northeast of the main building, about 30 meters away, are the facility's former stables. The single-storey buildings are on the northern edge of the property on the street and join the northeast corner of the forecourt. They date from the 18th century and are now partly used as garages.

Gardens

The approximately 4.5 hectare gardens are divided into different sections and individual gardens. The terrain slopes gently from north to south and offers sweeping views over the Wittenham Clumps to the Berkshire Downs . A game garden, a formal Italian garden and a croquet meadow lie to the south of the manor house . To the east of the manor house, the terrace flanked by the loggia is joined by another formal garden, which was once the kitchen garden of the property. In the extreme south there is an orchard. The western wild garden is natural and has a lot of tree growth. There are also two fish ponds surrounded by polluted willows . These can already be seen on a map from 1624 and perhaps remnants of the former monastery property at this point. On the east side of the croquette is a square pigeon tower from the 17th century. The half-timbered building has a pan-covered pyramid roof and stands on mushroom-shaped stone plinths. Its compartments are lined with brick .

Former kitchen garden

From the terrace of the manor house, two high house pillars with pine cones lead to the flower garden known as the ground floor . It is 1,500 square meters and is surrounded all around by walls made of stone , broken stone and brick. That is why this part is sometimes also called the walled garden . Before the Morrells moved in, it was used as a kitchen garden. Lady Ottoline redesigned the former twelve beds to 24, planted them with flowers and surrounded them with low box hedges . The beds are separated from each other by gravel paths, with tall, narrow, shaped Irish yew trees at their corners . Only the central path in the extension of the east-west axis of the manor house is planted with grass. Stairs in the south-east and south-west corner lead to the lower croquette lawn.

Italian garden

Directly south of the mansion is a terraced meadow, which is closed on its southern edge by a retaining wall and a high yew hedge. A large aisle was cut in the middle of the hedge to provide a view of the surrounding landscape. The terrace meadow leads over to a grassy, ​​slightly inclined slope, which is flanked by avenues of lime trees in the east and west . The Morrells originally planned to divide this slope into terraces as well, but the project was never realized. The slope ends in a rectangular, formal Italian-style garden to the south. This is almost completely taken up by a natural stone-framed water basin, which measures around 30 × 60 meters. It is surrounded by tall yew hedges in the north, south and east. Statues based on ancient models stand in hedge niches . On the east side - in the middle of the hedge - there is a small wooden summer house, which may have been built by D. H. Lawrence. In the middle of the pond is a stone platform with a seated Venus ; Cupid at her feet . The garden may have been designed by Ottoline Morrell herself and laid out with the help of Philip Tilden. Its model is said to be the garden of the Florentine Villa Capponi , which at the time was owned by Ottoline's aunt Lady Caroline Louisa Scott.

literature

  • Behind the scenes. In: World of Interiors. October 2013, ISSN  0264-083X , pp. 294-305 ( digitized version ).
  • Garsington's artistic legacy. In: The Oxford Times . June 30, 2009 ( online ).
  • Garsington Manor launches to the market. In: Country Life . June 21, 2012 ( online ).
  • Great opera in the garden. In: The time . June 17, 1994 ( online ).
  • Deborah Kellaway: About Pugs, Peacocks and Pekingese. The garden at Garsington Manor. In: David Wheeler (Ed.): Garden reading: The most beautiful stories of English garden enthusiasts. Translated from English by Claudia Arlinghaus. Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, Munich 2015, ISBN 978-3-421-04001-5 , pp. 122–142 (excerpts from Google Books ).
  • Jeremy Musson: Garsington Manor. In: Country Life. March 18, 1982, ISSN  0045-8856 , pp. 690-692.
  • Jeremy Musson: Garsington Manor. In: Country Life. July 3, 1997, ISSN  0045-8856 , pp. 56-59.
  • Nikolaus Pevsner, Jennifer Sherwood: Oxfordshire (= The Buildings of England. Volume 45.) Penguin, London 1974, pp. 611-612.
  • Miranda Seymour: Why Garsington Manor was Britainʼs most scandalous wartime retreat. In: The Guardian . Edition of July 25, 2014 ( online ).

Web links

Commons : Garsington Manor  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p Entry of Garsington Manor in the English list of monuments on historicengland.co.uk , accessed January 19, 2020.
  2. ↑ Patrick O'Connor: Obituary: Leonard Ingrams. In: The Guardian. Edition of August 10, 2005 ( online ).
  3. ↑ a b c d e Garsington’s artistic legacy. In: The Oxford Times. 2009 ( online ).
  4. ↑ a b c d Garsington Manor launches to the market. In: Country Life. 2012 ( online ).
  5. ↑ Garsington Manor on infobritain.co.uk ( Memento from September 18, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  6. ↑ Miranda Seymour: Why Garsington Manor was Britainʼs most scandalous wartime retreat. 2014 ( online ).
  7. ↑ a b Information on the ground floor on the Oxfordshire Garden Trust website , accessed January 19, 2020.
  8. ↑ a b Great Opera in the Garden. In: The time. 1994 ( online ).
  9. ↑ a b c English Country Opera House. In: The Wall Street Journal . July 2, 2012 ( online ).
  10. ↑ Deborah Kellaway: From Pugs, Peacocks and Pekingese. The garden at Garsington Manor. 2015, p. 122 ff.
  11. ↑ a b Deborah Kellaway: From Pugs, Peacocks and Pekingese. The garden at Garsington Manor. 2015, p. 122 ff.
  12. ↑ Deborah Kellaway: From Pugs, Peacocks and Pekingese. The garden at Garsington Manor. 2015, p. 122 ff.

Coordinates: 51 ° 42 ′ 51 ″  N , 1 ° 9 ′ 33 ″  W.