Stowe House

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Stowe House 2002
Stowe House 1750

Stowe House is a historic country estate in Stowe , northeast of Oxford , in Buckinghamshire , England .

history

The estate was built in 1676 by the influential English Temple-Grenville family on land owned by the family since 1571. Well-known architects helped design Stowe House and its gardens, including John Vanbrugh , William Kent , Lancelot Brown , James Gibbs , Robert Adam , John Soane , Thomas Pitt and other members of the Society of Dilettanti . The complex comprises a 279 meter long main house and numerous outbuildings, which are located in around 26 hectares of gardens, the Stowe Landscape Gardens , and are surrounded by originally 2,000 hectares of parkland that stretched north to Northamptonshire .

Stowe School , a renowned British public school, has been on the property since 1924 . In 1989 the grounds became the property of the National Trust .

The entire country estate is under British monument protection . Most of the buildings are listed in the list of monuments as grade I buildings (extraordinary, partly international importance), the others as grade II. The garden is considered a prime example of the perfectly shaped English landscape garden of the 18th century .

Stowe House is open to the public during the school holidays and the park and gardens are open all year round.

Building history

Layout

Peter Temple, a sheep farmer from Burton Dasset , Warwickshire , leased a farm in Stowe in 1571, which Peter’s son John ran after his father’s death in 1578 and which bought the property eleven years later.

main building

From 1676 for Sir Richard Temple (1634-1697) built on the site of a sheep farm acquired by his grandfather Peter Temple in 1571 and is the heart of the present-day property. It was then rebuilt and expanded by Viscount Cobham and Cobham's nephew, Viscount Cobham.

The front of the house is 279 meters long and the building has more than 400 rooms.

Gardens

Garden plan from 1910
Lancelot 'Capability' Brown

Stowe Landscape Gardens are a prime example of the perfectly shaped English landscape garden of the 18th century. However, there was always criticism of the overabundance, as the gardens include around 40 other buildings and countless statues and other architectural elements.

In 1718 the royal gardener, Charles Bridgeman von Cobham, was commissioned to redesign the garden using the ideas of Richard Boyle . Important goals were to give up the symmetry of the formerly formal garden , to incorporate the landscape and to equip it with antique details such as temples and statues. The villagers of Stowe were quickly relocated and their houses demolished, only the medieval St. Marys Church and the cemetery were spared and were included in the overall design. Bridgeman resolved the main axis to the house by an inclined transverse axis, at the end of which Sir John Vanbrugh built a garden monopteros in 1721 . However, numerous baroque and formal elements were preserved as Ahaz and various architectural rear sections.

Bridgeman followed William Kent , who, as a landscape painter, incorporated ideal-typical principles into the garden design, further connecting the garden with the surroundings to suggest infinity ('non finito') and replacing the straight lines with irregularities to create the 'picturesque' that Picturesque ones, to be included in nature in order to stimulate the viewer's imagination , following the guidelines of William Gilpin in his "Remarks on Picturesque Beauty". He also removed other architectural parts of the garden, but integrated many temples and trees into the gardens.

Kent's successor Lancelot 'Capability' Brown (1716–1783) gave the facility its final appearance. He combined the various parts of the garden into a whole and gave him the political statement desired by Cobham as a supporter of the Whigs : The many buildings and sculptures demonstrate the new spirit of the Whigs to the existing government; all accessories symbolized content from antiquity, the Renaissance and Gothic, i.e. content from the time before absolutism . The formal language of nature should demonstrate the idea of ​​political freedom. There were over ninety scenes on a five-kilometer circular route (of which only about forty are left today). East of the central axis that Bridgemans had introduced, Kent created his Elysian Fields with various temples. Next to it was Hawkwell Field and north of it Grecian Valley .

Parkland

The family's original estates included 2,000 acres of farmland, forests, lakes and farmland. Roads, extensive bridle paths and various deer enclosures were laid out in the 1620s, before the gardens were laid out.

Due to financial difficulties, the 2nd Duke sold extensive areas. Some of these areas have since been bought back. In 1992 Stowe Castle Farm, New Inn Farm in 1994 and Home Farm in 1995 were acquired. In the same year Brachacker was bought for the wildlife park, which was reopened in 2003. In 2012, the garden contained 2,000 trees, 40 temples and two lakes.

Ownership and use

Sir Richard Temple, the first Viscount Cobham
Richard Grenville, Richard Temple's nephew

The estate was owned for 450 years by the influential Temple-Grenville family, who dominated large parts of English politics in the 18th and 19th centuries and provided four prime ministers within 50 years .

However, the decline began 80 years earlier, when in 1848 the family's over-indebtedness made it necessary to sell numerous furnishings and utensils in the house. When the 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos died in 1889, he left the estate to his daughter, Lady Kinloss. When their eldest son perished in World War I, Stowe House was sold in 1921 by the second eldest son to Harry Shaw, who after a short time sold it to the newly founded Stowe School due to financial difficulties.

He sold it

  • 1921 to Harry Shaw , who after one year,
  • Sold to Stowe School in 1922 due to financial difficulties.

The main house has belonged to the school ever since; the land, including the park and garden, became the property of the National Trust in 1989 , which has been responsible for restoration and maintenance ever since. In 2005 the National Trust acquired the New Inn, built by Cobham in 1717, and had it renovated. With a budget of £ 9 million, the garden's entrance area was redesigned by 2012, including the Georgian Bell Gate . The interior of the New Inn was recreated in the 18th century.

literature

  • Michael Bevington: Stowe House. London, Paul Holberton 2003. ISBN 1903470048
  • Stowe In: Caroline Holmes (Ed.), Garden Art! The most beautiful gardens in the world (translated from English by Georgia Illetschko). Munich, Prestel 2001. pp. 84/85. ISBN 3-7913-2463-2

Web links

Commons : Stowe House  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Family tree of the Temple-Grenville family
  2. ↑ a b Your Garden, May 2012, p. 10

Coordinates: 52 ° 1 ′ 53 "  N , 1 ° 1 ′ 5"  W