landowners helped create regional traditions with a unique style all of their own.10 It wasn’t just that earlier traditions remained popular with many people, but sometimes innovations, which the textbooks would have one believe were universally and rapidly adopted, actually failed to find acceptance in certain areas. For instance, the new and characteristically ‘English’ landscape parks of the second half of the eighteenth century failed to catch on in Hertfordshire, where formal plantings of avenues and rides were laid out in the 1760s at major houses such as Cassiobury, Ashridge and Moor Park.11 Such geometric features belonged to an earlier era and went very much against the ‘natural’ spirit of landscape designers, such as Brown or Repton.
FIG 5 A map showing the distribution of landscape parks in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century.
We ignore these smaller parks and gardens at our peril if we want to create a true picture of the past that is not just based on a few well-known and very grand places. Such information will be invaluable when we come to interpret the remains of lost parks and gardens threatened by the immense expansion of housing that we are told will happen when the current economic downturn ends. Take one example: the large number of parks created in East Anglia in the late eighteenth century. Their quantity is impressive and their distribution pattern very informative.
There are, for instance, very few parks in the Fens, which were then plagued by endemic malaria and were characterised by numerous small landholdings. The heavy clay lands of Suffolk were also poorly emparked, but there were large parks on the poor, sandy soils of Norfolk’s Breckland (north of Bury St Edmunds, mostly around Thetford), where prominent families had owned hunting estates since the Middle Ages. Another interesting development was the proliferation of small parks around the increasingly prosperous urban centres of Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Ipswich and south Essex, which was already feeling the influence of London.
I mentioned that it was possible to discern distinctive regional styles and one of the best of these is the use of canals in parks and gardens of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in Suffolk. It is debatable whether this was a result of the area’s proximity to the influence of the Low Countries or reflected the suitability of the heavy, water-retentive clay soils that had been widely used for constructing moats in the Middle Ages. It is, of course, entirely possible that some people in the area simply created their own traditions of garden design as a conscious reaction to the increasing influence exerted by London fashions and popular designers like ‘Capability’ Brown, which many independent local landowners resented.12
We tend to think that the great parks and gardens were the product of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with perhaps a few Tudor excesses such as Hampton Court, Hatfield and Burghley Houses to point the way forward. In reality, however, members of the upper echelons of medieval society were showing off their power and influence by constructing staged and elaborate approaches to their castles, and by fashioning their own landscaped parks.13 A particularly fine example is to be found on the approaches to the now ruined castle at Castle Acre, in Norfolk. This involved the redirection of a Roman road in the mid-twelfth century, by way of a newly founded Cluniac priory. Even when driving these narrow rural lanes today, this circuitous diversion, which was only done to impress visitors with the family’s piety, still feels distinctly odd.14
By the same token, we also tend to see ‘agri-business’ and industrial farming as rather unpleasant and ultimately unnecessary creations of the later twentieth century, but, again, the reality is rather different. The rapid growth of Britain’s population throughout the nineteenth century meant that the additional mouths had somehow to be fed and although imports could (and did) help to meet the shortage, in pre-refrigeration times the majority of food, especially of milk and meat, had to be produced at home. And here the well-laid-out model farms of the large rural estates were to play a crucially important role.
We will see in Chapter 5 that the monuments to Britain’s industrial past have been cared for and cherished since the subject of industrial archaeology first emerged from the shadows back in the 1960s. But their rural equivalents have only very recently received anything like their fair share of recognition – and almost too late, because numerous farm buildings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are now becoming rather tatty and even derelict, simply because farmers in the twenty-first century are finding the money for their maintenance harder and harder to come by.15 A proportion has been saved for posterity by conversion to office or light industrial use, but sadly these remain a minority. The rest are quietly slipping into neglect and disrepair.
The great landed estates that were such a feature of the countryside from the seventeenth to the earlier to mid-twentieth centuries have, of course, left us superb country houses, parks and gardens.16 But these were essentially the cherries on the top of the cake. They were the obvious symbols of power and success, but much of the money needed to build and maintain such grand edifices came from the land surrounding them, which therefore needed to be efficiently farmed. And make no mistake: some of the estates could be very large indeed: the Census of 1871 shows that estates of the Duke of Bedford in his home county comprised a staggering 35,589 acres (14,408 hectares).17
By any criteria these estates were major businesses and they needed to be well run. They also had a huge influence on the development of the countryside and of rural communities – a role that has recently been recognised by historical archaeologists.18 But this was also the period when educated people had learned the lessons of the Enlightenment. They were not simply concerned with making money, but needed to establish and maintain their place in society, while at the same time demonstrating their good taste. It was a period, too, when growing urban industries could provide alternative sources of employment for rural people. So for these and other reasons, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the construction of a series of model farms, the majority of which (as we saw in the previous chapter) were built as partnership ventures between entrepreneurial tenants and their estate landlords.
The slide into disrepair of so many estate farms has happened quite slowly, and bodies such as English Heritage have been able to anticipate events by carrying out surveys of model farms which have given rise to specific reviews and an excellent overall synthesis by the leading authority on the subject, Susanna Wade Martins.19 I have to say that, although I was aware of changes in the design of modern and early modern farm buildings, I was not able to discern any obvious pattern, apart from a general progression from small to large and also from decorative – even whimsical – to the more businesslike and severely functional buildings of Victorian high farming.
I mention whimsicality because sometimes farms occurred within sight of a carefully arranged view from a landscaped park, in which case they needed to be camouflaged to resemble a suitably romantic Gothic pile.20 Susanna gives several examples of these, one of which, illustrated in the pages of the Gentleman’s and Farmer’s Architect for 1762, actually includes corner towers that appear to have been reduced by artillery fire.21 My own favourite is the disguise of a range of farm buildings overlooking the great park at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, which have been made to resemble the turrets and battlements of a not very convincing medieval castle, which looks particularly odd – rather like a brick-built film set – when viewed from the modern road,
