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Welcome
to Timothy Mowl's site on Garden and Architectural History.
The
UK is full of historic architecture and landscapes, but there are still
many lost or simply forgotten gardens and landscapes waiting to be
discovered and periods of architectural history ripe for re-assessment.
Stourhead in Wiltshire and Stowe in Buckinghamshire, both owned by the
National Trust, are celebrated landscapes open to the public. But who
has heard of Enys, near Falmouth in Cornwall, a Sleeping Beauty of a
garden in the first stages of romantic decay with its walled kitchen
garden, summerhouses and chain of ponds or Sir Frank Crisp's wittily
cynical Edwardian layout at Friar Park, Henley-on-Thames with its
underground caves and fake Matterhorn? Some of the least known gardens,
those privately owned, can be the best to visit, just because they
remain unspoilt. And was William Kent, the early eighteenth-century
artist turned architect turned landscape designer, really a creative
genius or just a clever opportunist?
This
site gives you an idea of what Tim is trying to achieve with his
ongoing series of county guides to the historic landscapes and gardens
of England and his revisionist studies of great architects and cultural
aesthetes. He has published twelve books to date in the gardens series
and his latest is on Herefordshire (9 May 2012). Cambridgeshire will follow in May 2013. His most recent architectural biography on William Kent
was published in hardback by Jonathan Cape in May 2006, and is now
available in paperback from Pimlico. His latest polemic concerns the
social and architectural edginess of his home city: Bristol - City on the Edge (Frances Lincoln, 2006).
Opposite:
The Palladian Bridge, Wilton House, Wiltshire (top) and the Formal
Parterre, Longford Castle, Wiltshire, by kind permission of Lord Radnor
(bottom)
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