It’s rare that I think any garden is worth writing about in more than one post, and exceptionally rare for it to be more than two. But Oatlands breaks the rule – not so much for what remains but for what has been lost.

Apart from the Tudor palace  which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, the biggest loss is undoubtedly the two-storey grotto which was designed and constructed in the 1760s and which must rank as one of the most  important and unusual  ever built in Britain.  Sadly its  miserable fate came  just after better protection for  historic buildings had been introduced with the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 and which was conveniently “overlooked” by the District Surveyor who organised its demolition. It became a symbol of precisely what the new system was intended to prevent.

There aren’t many images of the grotto but thanks to the research and craftsmanship of John Wilkinson the structure has been bought back to life and can be seen in miniature form at Elmbridge Museum and on their website. I’m very grateful to John for his permission to use his photos to illustrate this post, and I definitely recommend you read the story of the model’s creation. 

The idea having a grotto as a garden feature had been around for a long time, but in Britain it probably reached its peak between the 1750s and 1790s.  Henry Clinton, 9th Earl of Lincoln, and owner of Oatlands, was one of the wealthy few who were involved in the building of more than one, perhaps inspired by his Grand Tour largely undertaken with Horace Walpole between 1739 and 1741.

His first was created at his Uncle Thomas’s residence at Claremont when an earlier three-arched cascade was converted into a grotto with 3 main “caves” around  1750. The work was done  by Joseph Pickford, a London stonemason under the direction of  the landscape designer Stephen Wright who had worked with  William Kent.  One of Lincoln’s cousins, Colonel James Pelham, wrote to Uncle Thomas [the 1st Duke of Newcastle] telling him that “at the grotto the arches are got 12 foot high” and that some “glass cinders”  were incorporated inside, while they had also “fixed all the great stones at the rock which is a fine thing and evergreen plantation was planted behind.”

For more on the Claremont cascade and grotto see this earlier post and the Historic England register entry]

 

Stephen Wright was later described by poet Thomas Gray as the “new Gardiner or Director of my Lord’s Taste” and it was he who worked with Lincoln on developing the landscape at Oatlands including the grotto.  One of the sketches for it survives in RIBA archive.

While Lincoln was deservedly thought to be extravagant, claims by some that he spent £40,000 on the grotto are wildly exaggerated. Michael Symes’s researches in the Lincoln/Newcastle archives at Nottingham University  found detailed accounts of payments for materials and labour  that only amounted to around £2500.

[If you want to know more detail of the costs etc checkout his article in Garden History 1981]

The grotto was a two-story structure built into a bank and constructed around a redbrick core that contained 137,000 bricks, and also incorporated two tons of “scull iron” [metal slag waste from foundries] that cost £6 and 2 1/4 tons of “refuse glass”  [crushed or fine glass powder that could be used as a partial replacement for sand when making cement] which cost less than £5. It was then at least partially faced with “rockified stone” [ie tufa] sent up from Bath in 1762. The reason I say perhaps only partially is because this seems only to have cost £6.

The lower level had three rooms:  a gaming room, a hall with stalactites and a large cold bath presided over by a copy of the Medici Venus. Upstairs was a single much larger room used for banquets and tea parties.   It was reached by external ramps with [to us at least] rather unusual flooring  because in 1766 Lord Lincoln also acquired  a rather bizarre collection of animal remains: 10,000 horses teeth  “ground and polished” for £40,  along with 10,000 cow’s teeth for £20 and  5,000 trotter bones. They formed a “rustic” approach- as suggested by Thomas Wright’s Universal Architecture  published ten years earlier.

 

Just as at Claremont  the grotto overlooked water. Again as at Claremont this was not natural but fed by water piped in from St George’s Hill.   Joseph Spence  the historian and gardener, knew Oatlands well and describes the small lake  ” as clear as chrystal. … [which] will allways give you a Picture of its’ Front [ie a reflection of the grotto]. .. ’tis to be inhabited by a great variety of Gold & Silver Fish.” However, Horace Walpole was less flattering calling it “a basin of dirty water.”

The pond survived  by the time John Claudius Loudon visited in 1837 he commented that  although  “the beautiful grotto, which has been admired by thousands, still exists unimpaired”  it had been  “divested of its almost indispensable accompaniment, the water: inattention to the pipes has led to this result; and now, instead of the bath being full, and the limpid stream seen, broken, and trickling over, and down between the interstices of a portion of rock and shellwork on one side, to fill the pond in front of the grotto, all is dry and cheerless. ”  He ended by hoping that “Whoever, in future, may become the occupant of this once-admired place, it is to be hoped, will endeavour to restore all that is calculated to regain its former fame.” Unfortunately no-one ever did and when  the London to Southampton railway line went close to the estate in the 1838 it cut across the pipes, after which the water was drained and the site planted as woodland.

Spence also tells us that “a  little farther on, on each side, will be an Aviary in the Grove-work; with..a  Set of fine well-chosen Chinese Pheasants: & all about the sides of the Area, will be scatter’d the chief beauties of his Green-House, Orange Trees, Lemons, Myrtles, &c: all the Summer, or pleasing, Season. Several of the old Trees are lett… in the open Grovette…”

The grotto was not to be a place of solitude and contemplation but of pleasure and entertainment and Spence goes on to  tell us that on summer evenings there would be “a great number of Chrystal Lamps.. fix’t properly, & all sparkling from amidst the leaves of these Trees. All this, enliven’d with the music of the nightingales… or by Instrumental music, & perhaps a Dance on the Green-Carpet all over the midst of it.”  But if it rained “what more charming place can there be to retire to, than the Upper Grotto? Adorn’d with a profusion of the finest Shells; & some of the most chosen Metals, Spars, & Oares: & all Illumin’d by the most beautiful Chandeliers, that hang down from the Roof all around you. The very shower, that drove you into this charming shelter, will add to the pleasures of it; for all the variety of Flowers around you, and every Rose, & every Honey-suckle that creeps up almost each tree there, will send forth new perfumes, in gratitude for being refresht by it.”

You can find Joseph Spence’s full description in this article by Tim Knox.

Spence died in 1768 so did not see the  finished ornate interior work  since somewhat to my surprise serious decoration didn’t start until 1775 when Wright commissioned the established grotto-maker Joseph Lane of Tisbury in Wiltshire to come and finish the interior embellishments but also modify the exterior. Work began in April that year  and then lasted three long seasons [no work being done in the coldest winter months] until June 1778. The accounts show the first season’s work lasted about 20 weeks at a cost of about £75 and was spent facing the structure with more tufa, but also making the lower floor more like a cave from the outside. Stone was delivered by barge from London at the cost of £16 and lead sheeting was also bought, presumably for roofing or perhaps for lining the bath. They also show that a lot of repair work needed to be done particularly to the windows before work could start on the decoration the following year.

In April 1776 Lane returned to Oatlands, accompanied by his son Josiah and they worked right through until Christmas Eve, charging a total of just £116, a mere fraction of what painters and stuccoists could charge for work inside Georgian mansions. It was also a lot less than the cost of materials. This included  30 tons of “picked grotto stuff at five shillings per ton from a Glass manufacture in Suffolk whilst Eleanor Coade supplied artificial stone capitals at a cost of £307.03 shillings, although its possible some of these might have been intended for other work on the estate.   Lots of flint work was added in 1777 and Lincoln also acquired a quantity of   ornamental stone fragments from Somerset house which was being demolished by William Chambers.

As you can see from the survey drawn up just before demolition Lanes altered the interior layout, making it more complex. From the left hand entrance on the lower floor a curved passageway with arches led to a central chamber which was decorated with artificial stalactites covered with “spar” which were Lane’s speciality. It was lit only by two concealed high up round windows  creating a gloomy perhaps mysterious atmosphere with  light reflected from the minerals  adding shadowy effect and leaving dark corners. All the passageways were  patterned with minerals – thought to be mainly a transparent form of gypsum, red calcite, and pieces of blue glass. It’s no wonder that Michael Symes called it “a crystalline dream cave.”

Another winding passageway led into the Gaming Room which had a fireplace, and yet another much longer passage led round the back of the central chamber to the enormous Bath which was about 11 feet long, and 5 wide and deep and which would have been filled with  cold water.  The walls had shelves presumably for books to read while freezing in the water, and there are large shell ornaments also set into wall. It was watched over by a copy of the second century Medici Venus.

The upper chamber was not altered much, but was given  plasterwork in different colours and filled with Chinese style furniture. It became a favoured space of the Duke and Duchess of York, later owners Oatlands House.

The Duchess would frequently have her lunch served here. Perhaps its most famous moment was when it is said that “George IV., when Prince of Wales, gave a splendid supper to the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, and the princes and generals in their train, on their visit to England after the battle of Waterloo. The chamber for the occasion was lighted by cut-glass chandeliers; the chairs and sofas had satin cushions embroidered by the Duchess.”

When the estate was split up in [see earlier post]  the grounds around the grotto were transferred from Oatlands House to become part of the  gardens of  next-door Oatlands Lodge. That was sold in 1919 and separated from  unconnected with the hotel. 

As said in my first post about Oatlands James Lees-Milne visited in 1944. He described the grotto as being “extremely elaborate” but “unfortunately it is fast deteriorating, being at the mercy of children who pick the shells off the walls….. The outside is made of decayed lava stone, encrusted with large fossils and sea urchins. It contains an upstairs room in bad condition, the walls inlaid with fluorspar and vauxhall looking-glass plates, the ceiling hung with great stalactites of felspar. Below are wonderful passages and a subterranean hall dripping with stalactites. The walls are decorated in rude chevrons of glittering red and blue stones, and lit by specially constructed windows once filled with stained glass, judging from the few bits that remain. There is a tiled bathroom, its walls and ceilings decorated with whorls of mussel shells, and great conches. Of its kind this is far the best grotto I have ever seen, a superb plaything of variety and imagination… From the lead pipes everywhere in evidence it is apparent that the walls were made to drip and cascade with water, when the rare stones glistened. There are niches for flambeaux. Chandeliers may have hung from some of the stalactites. In front of the grotto is a deep depression which was at one time a pool for swans and ducks. The hermitage nearby was pulled down just before the war. I took three photographs of the outside of the grotto, but the light was bad and my lens too narrow to take the interior.”

It was not to be there much longer because in 1948 it was demolished. It had not been added to the first list of buildings of architectural and historical interest prepared in connection with the new 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and so  when the local District Council Server requested permission for demolition from the Ministry of Works on the grounds that it was a dangerous structure was unsafe for trespassing children,  it was granted without any questions.  The Council had undertaken to consult with the Surrey County Council before action was taken, but it did not do so although it transpired afterwards that discussions were actually proceeding between Surrey County Council and other parties interested in its future.

Marcus Whiffen writing a few months later said “It is difficult for anyone who saw the Oatlands grotto being demolished, with the immensely solid brickwork which formed its structural core revealed by the pickaxe and pneumatic drill, to believe that the unsoundness on account of which it was demolished was of a very radical nature. No doubt some of the external rockwork was loose, and of course any empty and unprotected building is a source of potential danger to somebody or other. But these were surely things which could have been rectified for a very modest expenditure of money and time. Instead, several hundred man-hours (to use the current jargon) went to the destruction of a work of art which took twelve man-years to make, and which belongs to a category of art which may never again lie within the compass of the human spirit.     That a building of the very special kind of importance of the Oatlands grotto should have been destroyed without chance of a public appeal to save it is almost incredible and ought to be quite impossible”    from Architectural Review May 1948

All that’s left now is a pile of stones tucked away in shrubbery and a few more in Elmbridge Museum.   However just as I was finishing this post a few weeks ago I came across a bit of good news for a change.

A new webpage appeared on the Museum website celebrating the grotto and in particular the work of John Wilkinson who has created a scale model of it because he was “bewitched” by a 1937 black and white photo. It’s truly a labour of love and I really recommend you read how John went about it and to see the rest of his photographs.

Let’s end with the words of The Architect’s Journal in February 1948: “Altogether a tragic business. We are once again reminded that vandalism persists despite the most elaborate of safeguards-Section 42 of the TCP Act. The only answer to vandalism is vigilance on the part not only of amenity societies but of you and me as well.” And that’s as true  today as it was then.

For once you are spoiled for choice if you want to know more.  There’s Christina Richard’s book The Grotto Makers (2018) about the Lanes and their work. There’s a great piece  about the Grotto and Cottage Orné by my fellow blogger, the Folly Flaneuse [if you don’t know her blog then you should definitely add it to your Saturday morning  breakfast routine]. Follow that up with an erudite but very readable article New Light on Oatlands Park by Michael Symes in Garden History 1981;  and another article about the grotto “A Complicated Beauty” by Tim Knox in the 1992 Georgian Group Journal. There’s also an entry about it in the Grotto Directory;  and of course there are lots of mentions on the website of Elmbridge Museum.