Chevening

The gardens at Chevening today reflect four main stages of development since the 17th century.

It is believed that sometime after 1688 Thomas Lennard, 1st Earl of Sussex, began to lay out formal gardens round an ornamental canal to the south of the house. General James Stanhope, 1st Earl Stanhope, who bought the estate from Lord Sussex’s heirs in 1717, continued within this design. He acquired the parkland to the south of the garden and his collection of Roman tombstones, sheltered by a later structure known together with the tombstones as “Fort Mahon” after one of his victories during the War of the Spanish Succession, is still on the west side of the lake. The original garden plan may have been influenced by the formal style of André Le Nôtre (1613-1700), who worked in England as well as at Versailles, and later by the naturalism of Charles Bridgeman (1690-1738). The busy Earl Stanhope, who was effectively Prime Minister to King George I until his death in 1721, built up a collection of eleven books on gardening.

The 3rd Earl Stanhope was a scientific inventor of great originality and industry. His most durable legacy has proved to be the Stanhope printing press, but he also trialled prototypes of a steam-powered paddle-ship on the ornamental canal, with family members and servants acting as crew. From 1774, in his father’s lifetime, he altered the gardens to reflect the less formal style then fashionable. He laid out Chatham’s Ride and possibly the Keyhole on the Downs to the north of the house, at the suggestion of his cousin and later father-in-law, William Pitt the Elder, 1st Earl of Chatham. In later life he seems to have lost interest in the gardens, devoting himself and his fortune to scientific invention. By the time he died in 1816 his son and heir declared that he had inherited a “house standing in a hayfield”.

The 4th Earl was a gifted amateur landscape gardener who throughout his adult life travelled widely in Europe. He was a founder member of the Medico-Botanical Society of London and a cousin of Sir Joseph Banks, first director of Kew Gardens. Under his direction the Lake with its islands assumed its present form on the site of the earlier canal and basin. He introduced Italian gardens and a sloping lawn to the west and south of the house and planted many specimen trees. He created the Maze designed by his grandfather and round the Lake established pleasure grounds with winding gravel paths. On his death in 1855 he left, along with his will, instructions to his successors to “leave unaltered the sight and arrangement of the said gardens, pleasure grounds, parks, woods and plantations”. After his death no major structural changes to the garden were made while the Stanhopes lived at Chevening.

On the 7th Earl’s death in 1967 the Chevening Trust took over the House and Estate, which are run at no cost to the public purse. The gardens had been maintained for some time at only a basic level and had become overgrown: the Trustees therefore invited Elizabeth Banks, later President of the Royal Horticultural Society, to take them in hand. It is Elizabeth Banks’s design that you see today, recalling features of the earlier garden plans, particularly that of the 4th Earl. Her work has been developed by the current garden designer, George Carter, to include more of the 18th Century. The Head Gardener, Chris Coombs, works within his plan, in collaboration with garden expert Marian Boswall.

Recent developments include a new topiary walk designed by Marian Boswall in the former Flower Garden, now renamed the Pitt Garden in commemoration of the close interrelationship between the Stanhope and Pitt families, who between them gave Britain three 18th Century prime ministers. Extensive restoration work is being undertaken in various of the wooded compartments or “bosquets”.

CHEVENING HOUSE
Chevening House, attributed in Colen Campbell’s classic early 18th Century architectural work Vitruvius Britannicus to the English architect Inigo Jones and dating from 1617-1630, with later additions, is at its heart one of the earliest examples of English Palladianism, developed by Jones from the architecture of Renaissance Italy and classical Rome. When General James Stanhope, Viscount Stanhope of Mahon and shortly to become 1st Earl Stanhope, bought the house and its estate in 1717 for £28,000 from the Lennard family which had built it a century earlier, it consisted of the present centre block of the building, less the massive pedimented extensions on either side from which the wings emerge. The Lennards had remodelled the building, moving the entrance from the south to the north front, although their most ambitious project, which had been to create a stateroom on the first and second floors in the form of a double cube, got no further than a design by Jones’s assistant John Webb, made during the Commonwealth, which survives in the Victoria & Albert Museum.

In the same year that Lord Stanhope bought the house he became in effect prime minister to King George I. This demanded a bigger house than Jones’s Palladian villa, and Lord Stanhope turned to Nicholas Dubois, a Huguenot military engineer working in London, and Thomas Fort of the Office of Works, who had worked at Hampton Court, to extend the house by building new pavilions and yards, connected to the original block by quadrant corridors, to the east and west of a new forecourt. The west wing housed the coach house and stabling and the east wing the kitchen and domestic offices. The forecourt was finished to the north by the wrought iron clair-voyée screen that remains today.

In 1776-77 the 2nd Earl replaced the former (and now restored) hipped roof with a flat-roofed rectangular attic story. In 1780, to counter problems with damp, Robert (or possibly his brother James) Adam covered the exterior in a patent oil cement, which failed, leading to three court cases and the payment by Adam of £1,200 in damages. In 1786 the 3rd Earl addressed the damp problem by covering the house in dun-coloured ceramic “mathematical” tiles, which from a distance gave the impression of a stone building. This innovation involved the removal of the fine stone window mullions and stone corners of the house, the replacement of the 17th Century windows with Georgian sash windows, and the addition of the Portland stone facings and Ionic pilasters that survive today. On inheriting the house in 1855, the 5th Earl replaced the Georgian windows with plate glass and added a substantial wooden porch to the front door, as well as introducing central heating for the first time. The 6th and 7th earls added a billiards room and a loggia to the west wing, and built riding stables and garages.

A Board of Trustees took control of the Chevening Estate on the 7th Earl Stanhope’s death in 1967, following the passing of the Chevening Estate Act eight years earlier, to manage it as a private owner runs a family estate at no cost to the taxpayer. The house was at that time in a poor state of repair. The flat roof had failed and the mathematical tiles had trapped damp, causing extensive decay to the brickwork behind them. The architect who took charge of the conservation project, Sir Donald Insall, recalled “a shattered and derelict relic of the past – a boxy and problematic pile with dingy ceramic tiles falling off like autumn leaves”. Donald Insall Associates removed all the tiles (other than those that remain in the blind arches in the forecourt), the attic story and the porch, replaced the shattered brickwork, created a new hipped roof with dormers, and reinstated the small-paned sash windows. The north front was given a new central pediment to justify the Ionic pilasters and echo the flanking pavilions. In 1975 the project received the European Architectural Heritage Year Medal for a Scheme of Exceptional Merit. The building, which is currently undergoing an extensive programme of rewiring and replumbing, is today better presented and maintained than at any previous time in its history.