Unfortunately I haven’t had a single answer to the question -“Why did he do it?” – that I posed at the end of last week’s post about Harlaxton the “Jacobethan” marvel dreamed up and then lovingly built by Gregory Gregory. But even if I had I doubt they’d have been as straightforward as what he told a visitor, in 1839 during the construction of the house.
Charles Greville noted in his memoirs that Gregory told him candidly that “as he is not married, has no children, and dislikes the heir on whom his property is entailed, it is the means and not the end to which he looks for gratification. He says that it is his amusement, as hunting or shooting or feasting may be the objects of other people.” So Harlaxton is essentially a rich man’s whim that was designed to occupy almost his entire lifetime. Thanks to several lucky breaks and against all the odds it has survived, inspired John Piper, and is still a place that the present owners rightly describe as “beyond your imagination.”
On the way to a family wedding last weekend I stopped off at Harlaxton near Grantham in Lincolnshire. Like John Claudius Loudon before me I “had heard much of this place from various architects and amateurs for several years.”
The Garden History Blog 
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