the grange book- sample pages

V I S U A L P A G E O N L Y V I S U A L P A G E O N L Y

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G R A N G E P A R K O P E R A H A m P s H i R E

2120 The GranGe ParT OneMr Henley’s delicate mansion

Mr Henley’s delicate mansion

1660 — 1786

H enley’s purchase reflected the changed temper of the times. After five decades of political

uncertainty and a debilitating civil war, it was a time to reorientate and reassess. Andrew Marvell wittily distilled the mood, couched in the garden of Nunappleton House, home of Lord Fairfax, the Commonwealth’s most enlightened warrior:

How vainly men themselves amazeTo win the palm, the oak, the bays,And their uncessant labours seeCrowned from some single herb or tree.

For men like Henley the 1660s were a time to put down roots and practise the arts of peace. It was also a time in which to build, and build in new ways. The old medieval order was gone. A new breed of educated and travelled patrons required dwellings that were airy, elegant and above all rational in their design and orientation. Nor did their interests end at the front door. Gardens needed to be designed, landscapes managed. For the architectural profession and its legion of artisans a golden age was about to unfold.

The Grange’s modern history begins in 1662 when the 650 acres of undulating parkland which comprised the Northington and Swarraton estates were bought by a young lawyer Robert Henley, one of many men of means whose fortunes had been transformed by the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

PREVIOUS PAGE: Left: John Norden's 1607 map of Hampshire showing "Graung"

Right: Miniature portrait by Samuel Cooper 1659, thought to depict

Sir Robert Henley (c1624-1692) Victoria & Albert Museum, London

RIGHT: Robert Henley (1708-1772), first Earl of Northington c1760

National Portrait Gallery, London

20

54 The GranGe InTrODUCTIOnA fertile and pleasant place

7776 The GranGe ParT ThreeA new power in the land

LEFT: Dining room 1871

RIGHT: Charles Robert Cockerell (1788-1863) c1825 by Alfred Edward Chalon

BELOW: The inner sanctum at Bassae was Cockerell’s principal inspiration for

the new dining room at The Grange

the size of the house and given the building a better overall proportion. Baring thought it over-ambitious and unnecessarily expensive. Cockerell’s more ‘affordable’ plan was to create an elegant new dining room with a servants’ hall beneath, at the west end of the building north of Smirke’s new wing, and to extend Smirke’s west wing at right angles southwards. This further extension would create a private sitting room for Ann Baring – ‘the beautifulest room you can imagine’, as Jane Carlyle later described it – which would connect directly to an elegant new conservatory, ‘a place of perpetual spring’.

XXX

The dining room which Cockerell now set about designing was the fruit of the seven years he spent abroad after the completion his apprenticeship with Smirke in 1810. The European war had made travel difficult in France and Italy but Athens and Constantinople were more accessible. In Athens Cockerell joined an international set of young archaeologists, artists and poets. On a visit to the island of Aegina, where Lord

Byron was one of the party, the group discovered a limestone-faced temple with cream stucco work. What was revelatory about the temple was evidence of elaborate polychromatic decoration, something which Johann Joachim Winckelmann, author of the sacred text on classicism in art, had always discounted.

An even greater discovery for Cockerell was the Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassae which Ictinus, architect of the Parthenon, had created in 420-400 BC. It was a revelation, not least because it broke so many hitherto accepted rules of classical architecture. The temple’s greatest prize was the 102-foot long high-relief marble frieze which decorated its cella, or inner sanctum. The frieze was removed by Cockerell and the German archaeologist Haller von Hallerstein and later bought at auction by the British Museum which subsequently created a special room for it (the modern Room 16). Before parting with the frieze, Cockerell had plaster casts made. The use he made of these can be seen in places as different as the Travellers’ Club in London, of which Cockerell was a founder member, and in his own great museum project, the Ashmolean in Oxford.

30 The GranGe 31

ABOVE: The Hon Henry Drummond (1730-95) by Gainsborough 1787

Collection of the Duke of Northumberland

RIGHT: 17th century plasterwork of the gallery in The Grange 1970

29The GranGe ParT OneMr Henley’s delicate mansion28

eight-year-old Algerian slave-boy to his niece Margaret Hamilton who, on her deathbed in 1759, had formally released the boy, giving him £800 in bank notes with the instruction ‘Put it in your pocket, tell nobody, and pay the butcher’s bill’. As his niece’s executor, Shanley sued the slave-boy for the return of the money, arguing that both he and the money belonged to the estate. Shanley’s case was backed by the Attorney-General but Henley threw it out, awarding costs to the boy. In his summing up Henley declared:

As soon as a man sets foot on English ground he is free: a negro may maintain an action against his master for ill usage, and may have a Habeas Corpus if restrained in his liberty.

It was, sadly, a personal opinion, an obiter dictum that created no precedent in law.

It was around the time of his ennoblement that Henley began a period of renovation of The Grange and its estate. Some suggested that his new-found status was the cue; but a man needs money and leisure

to effect such changes and Henley, whose workload was diminishing and whose health was already failing, had an abundance of both. His internal changes to the house were not admired. By altering doorways, blocking light-giving oculi, and inserting unwanted panelling, he is said to have darkened the interiors. Outside, he was more successful. He created a lake by damning the River Candover, commissioned a rustic bridge from Robert Adam, and sanctioned a good deal of new planting. ‘The grounds are beautifully laid out and not deficient in wood though it seems principally of modern growth’ noted the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1788.

Henley also extended the house westward. Plans drawn up by Robert Adam in 1764 indicate a service wing leading from the west door into a courtyard with a covered walkway. The extension was designed to house a range of new facilities including a bake house, brewhouse and pump room. All three are listed in the inventory which was drawn up before the house was leased to the Prince of Wales in 1795. But there was more. A kitchen, a pastry room, a scullery, a larder, a dairy and a bottle house were also added. The estate was clearly beginning to take on airs.

Henley died in 1772. As a young man in chambers he had been addicted to port. Whether this was a factor or not, he suffered greatly from gout, a condition that did nothing to soften a difficult temper. (As he once grumpily remarked, ‘If only I had known that these legs were one day to carry a Lord Chancellor, I’d have taken better care of them when I was a lad’).

His son Robert, the second Earl of Northington, shared his father’s gracelessness and also suffered from ill health. An ally of Charles James Fox, he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1783, three other men, including the Duke of Devonshire, having already refused the position. It was an ill-fated assignment which lasted just eight months. A brief residence in Italy did nothing to improve Northington’s health. He died in Paris in 1788 whilst journeying back to England. There being no male heir, his sisters sold The Grange and what was by now its 3,000-acre estate to the Drummond family, the principal banking dynasty of the age. It would prove to be a fateful sale.

XXX

RIGHT: The Grange as it may have appeared on completion about 1670;

cutaway isometric projection from the north-west, by Stephen Conlin 2008

RIGHT: Robert Adam drawing 1764 for "New Designed Offices" at The Grange

Trustees of Sir John Soane Museum, London

4544 The GranGe ParT ThreeThe Grange transformed

RIGHT: George, Prince of Wales, 1792 by Richard Cosway (1742-1821). Watercolour on ivory,

mounted in a fine gold locket with a 'true-love' lock of plaited hair on the reverse suggesting

that it was intended as a love-token for either Mrs Fitzherbert or Mrs Crouch, the Prince's

lovers at the time. National Portrait Gallery, London.

The Prince of Wales’ relationship with The Grange was a somewhat on-off affair. In the spring of 1796 he called in Henry Holland, the architect of the prince’s lavish makeover of his London residence Carlton House and of the fledgling Brighton Pavilion, to assess the state of the place. Holland recommended repairing the roof leading, renewing the sash windows, repainting the exterior wood and ironwork, and carrying out minor renovations in the park. Yet no sooner was the work done than the prince attempted to rid himself of the place. After the Duke of St Albans declined to take it in 1797, The Grange was sub-let to Lord Lonsdale whose sister the Duchess of Bolton briefly took up residence.

In 1799 the prince returned and embarked on a fresh spending spree. New papers by Robson and Hull were hung in the principal rooms, carpets arrived from Kent & Luck, Morells were paid £500 for re-upholstery. Bespoke statuary arrived by the cartload for the gallery, dining room and staircase, along with ‘two vase lamps with two burners each and shades, japanned and richly ornamented’ which later ended up in the Royal Pavilion.

The partying in 1799-1800 was on a grand scale. A larger than usual staff was retained and wine bill arrears topped £700. Yet by the autumn of 1800 the prince had grown tired of the place and left, taking all the recently imported furnishings with him. The harem of sisters he had kept at The Grange also left. A Mrs Papendiek later recalled, ‘The brother of the females was raised from groom to head of the stud stables and at his death buried with honours of the royal liveries and his sisters afterwards taken into the queen’s household as assistant dressers’.

The most important legacy of the prince’s brief involvement with The Grange comes in the form of the detailed inventory that was drawn up for the implementation of the lease in October 1795. It survives in the Royal Archive at Windsor and has been meticulously transcribed by the distinguished architectural historian Jane Geddes. As a record of the layouts and contents of Samwell’s house and of the Grange estate itself, it makes fascinating reading.

The preamble announces: Agree to let to George the capital mansion The Grange with offices stables outhouses coach house dove house erection and buildings to the same messuage with park garden pleasure grounds plantation sheep walks fields closes pieces of lands… After 12 years George will leave the estate in good repair that is to say dove house conservatory ice house and garden stocked and cropped as now maintaining fences walls and young plantation hay straw and fodder to be consumed on the estate and dung manure and compost to be laid and spread on the said premises… George will not make any alteration or addition to the building nor break up and convert to tillage the deer park or sheep down.

The inventory lists 400 deer, a dove house ‘well stocked’, ten swans, eight turtle doves, six canary birds, three peafowls, three boats on the water in good repair, and a sun-dial. The conservatory has 390 green house plants in pots (‘healthy’) and 94 roses. The list of produce from the two-acre kitchen garden is even more formidable:

The garden cropped as follows: 22 poles of spinach 150 bushels of potatoes 16 bushels of onions 30 bushels of carrots 1200 savoy cabbages 700 late cabbages 2000 early cabbages, 700 purple broccoli 700 cauliflower broccoli 2200 celery 660 brussel sprouts 1800 lettices of sorts 2600 endives garlick and shallots 8 beds of asparagus 8 rows of artichokes 10 poles of horse raddish 40 perches of strawberry land in the mead and 10 perches in the garden leeks parsnips and beet roots 60 perches of gooseberry and currant plants healthy ditto of raspberry of sorts 230 wall fruit trees upon the gardner’s house, farmhouse and garden walls of peaches nectarine pears plums vines and cherries in good condition 130 espalias of apples pears and plum trees 25 standard apples and plums ice house stocked, a meat wire safe on wheels.

After the prince’s departure the house and estate were overseen by Lord Henry Stuart, a young diplomat with

local connections. It was Stuart’s death and that of his wife 11 days later in August 1809 which so upset William Cobbett. (A mutual interest in pointers had caused Stuart and Cobbett to strike up a friendship during the latter’s time in America). No friend of the aristocracy, Cobbett wrote in Rural Rides:

I could not pass by the Grange Park without thinking of Lord and Lady Henry Stuart whose lives and deaths surpassed what we read of in the most sentimental romances. Very few things that I have met with in my life ever filled me with sorrow equal to that which I felt at the death of this most virtuous and most amiable pair.

XXX

Even before Henry Drummond Jnr’s death in 1794, he and has wife were having difficulties with Henry, their eldest child. In April 1793 Anne Drummond wrote to her grandmother: ‘The children are all quite well. Henry I believe will very soon go to Harrow School and I hope turn out the Non[e]such you at present think him’.

More followed two days later:

Mr Drummond has been in town to attend Charing Cross [Drummonds Bank] these two months past, during which time I have been here with the children, both on account of their health and my own. Your favourite Henry goes to School this autumn – he is very young for a public school, but such a Pickle, all management of him at home is vain to attempt, except when his father is with him.

A ‘pickle’, in eighteenth century terminology, was an unruly child. With an ailing and often absent father, the worryingly precocious seven-year-old was already a prize specimen of the type. The boy had no difficulty in settling at Harrow. The Head Master Joseph Drury, a family friend, kept a fatherly eye on him. Henry’s letters to his parents often allude to his father’s illness but boyish preoccupations quickly take over:

3332 The GranGe ParT TWOMr Henley’s delicate mansion

ABOVE: The Hon Henry Drummond (1730-95) by Gainsborough 1787 Collection of

the Duke of Northumberland.

RIGHT: Decorative scheme 1830 for the staircase of The Grange by an unknown artist

RIBA Library Drawings & Archives Collection.

129128 The GranGe ParT FIVeA baron and two conspicuous women

LEFT: Alexander Hugh, fourth Lord Ashburton, detested extravagence and was

horrified by his sister's use of a barouche with four horses and postilions.

This is an equally stylish traveller at The Grange c1860, possibly his father's sister

Louisa of whom he said "she thought the wolf was at the door if she had less than

£16,000 in her current account"

178 The GranGe 179ParT SIXSailing towards the sunset

PREVIOUS PAGES: Mabel (1866-1904), wife of Frank, fifth Lord Ashburton,

with her daughters Venetia and Aurea c1892

New Year's Day 1889 at The Grange hosted by Leonora and her son Frank.

Alexander is wintering abroad on Miranda

ABOVE: Leonora, widow of Alexander Hugh, fourth Lord Ashburton, in the drawing

room at 16 Cadogan Square, July 1899

261260 The GranGe ParT eIGhTSaving a lost cause

LEFT: From the Sale Particulars 16 November 1964 3pm at the Royal Hotel, Winchester

RIGHT: Charles Saumerez-Smith in the Ionic portico, 6 September 1979

In 1969 Baring submitted a new request for permission to demolish. Hampshire County Council indicated that this would be forthcoming, but a plea from Pevsner, Lord Kennet and others that the building be taken into guardianship by the government caused the application to be referred to the Historic Buildings Council. It was to no avail. The Council acknowledged that The Grange was ‘unique and superb, with a spectacular beauty’ but gave five reasons why it could not advise the Minister of Housing and Local Government to exercise his rights in the case.

(i) The building’s advanced state of disrepair and the high cost of putting this right.(ii) Its immense size and the lack of any known source of financial support.(iii) The unattractiveness of all but one of the interiors.(iv) The owner’s desire to demolish.(v) The distance of the house from any public road.

On 17 July 1970 permission to demolish was granted by Hampshire County Council, who, having gone through

the procedures, were not greatly amused to receive a letter from the new Conservative Minister of State ‘regretting the decision to allow demolition’. That same year an eloquent brief essay on The Grange by J. Mordaunt Crook appeared in a Festschrift for Sir John Summerson. On the essay’s final page the author observed that ‘this short account of Grange Park may well have to serve as its obituary’. It was not to be. But there, for the time being, the matter rested.

XXX

Had John Baring immediately called in the bulldozers or, as was rumoured at the time, ordnance from the Royal Engineers, the building would have been demolished. Or most of it. It had always been Baring’s intention to retain ‘as a sort of memorial folly’ Cockerell’s smaller Ionic portico and the building behind it. The fact that he did not act immediately was certainly due in part to his wife Susan. Having spent the early part of her marriage coping with the upheaval caused by the demolition and rebuilding of Stratton Park, she had never been overly

223PART SIXSailing towards the sunset222 The GranGe

LEFT: Venetia Baring (1890-1937) by Bassano, 4 February 1925

Venetia was "in waiting" at Windsor. She writes in 1916 "The King, the three children and

the second Belgian boy went haymaking with me in sole charge. We did quite a good

afternoon's work and "turned" a large piece of the field!…. I had the King at dinner last

night, he was very easy to keep going and in better spirits than when I first came".

In 1930 she wrote "Deafness and Happiness", an overview of her suffering with

guidance to others

ABOVE: Alexander and Doris Baring with their son, John, who would become

seventh Lord Ashburton

223ParT SIXSailing towards the sunset

ABOVE: Game books

This page, bottom left, January 1889. Alexander, fourth Lord Ashburton, was on

his new yacht, Miranda. Frank, his eldest son, had Viscount Hood join the party.

He would marry Hood's daughter, Mabel, a few months later.

ABOVE: Top left, October 1889. Alexander died in July and Frank,

fifth Lord Ashburton, signs himself A

149ParT SIXSailing towards the sunset148 The GranGe

239238 The GranGe ParT SeVenThe Wallach Years

LEFT: Entrance Hall 1935

ABOVE: Drawing Room 1935

LEFT: Charles Wallach shooting at The Grange c1952

ABOVE: Charles Wallach at The Grange c1952

was made to Queen Mary. It was rumoured that Wallach wished to trade The Grange for a peerage. If that was his plan, it came to nothing. In the view of the Ministry of Works, the Grange was ‘a white elephant’. Forty years later, when the house’s very survival was in question, both organisations had cause to regret their response.

With agricultural work declared a ‘reserved occupation’ at the start of the Second World War, the estate was not stripped of manpower and visited by loss as it had been during the First War. Baring Brothers bought back Stratton Park to use as its wartime headquarters and Baring properties within the old Grange Park demesne were also used to house bank staff. As the war progressed, the extensive woodlands of the joint Stratton and Grange estates were used to store tanks, guns, armoured vehicles and large quantities of ammunition.

In the winter of 1943, Wallach was asked if the Grange could be used to accommodate some of the thousands of American troops who were now stationed in Britain. He was only too happy to agree. He and his wife moved into the so-called bachelors’ wing behind

the picture gallery. Troops from the 47th Infantry Regiment of the US Army’s Ninth Division took over the main house, and the picture gallery was turned into an operations centre. It was there on 24 March 1944 that Churchill and Eisenhower met to discuss details of the D-Day invasion. Even more military equipment was now being secreted in the surrounding countryside. The area was protected by searchlights and gun emplacements but its contents were well disguised. The worst the estate suffered during the war was surplus ordnance being offloaded by German bombers heading home after raids on south coast ports.

To mark VE Day in May 1945, Wallach held a ball at the Grange, the house’s last party before the opera folk moved in with all their razzle-dazzle in the late 1990s. Eileen Wallach had died in 1944 at an unexpectedly young age. A widower now, and well into his 70s, Wallach saw no reason to move back into the main house. Since he worked until the last year of his long life, he was often away. He kept suites in the Savoy Hotel in London and the Plaza in New York and continued criss-crossing the Atlantic on the great liners of the day. In 1953 he

completed his fourth round-the-world trip, a journey he undertook in part to experience high-speed flight on the new Comet jet aircraft. He continued to host modest shooting parties at The Grange, regaling local friends and celebrity acquaintances with risqué stories at the luncheon table. Otherwise the house itself – ‘this marvellous place’ as he called it – was little used. Wallach would like to have turned it into a centre for the treatment of polio but he knew that its interiors were too vast for it to be successfully converted into a hospital, nursing home or rehabilitation centre. In 1952 he hosted a party for 150 victims of the disease at The Grange. ‘It was the most enjoyable day I have ever had’ he said afterwards.

Though The Grange and its estate needed more attention than the ageing Wallach could possibly give it, he refused to contemplate its sale. When John Baring, the future Lord Ashburton, enquired about the possibility of buying it back, he was roundly snubbed. ‘You’re far too young to own the finest country house in England outside Windsor Castle’ was the octogenarian’s curious reply.

After Wallach’s death in August 1964, the estate was again put up for sale. The notice which appeared in

Country Life was somewhat more muted than the one that had appeared 31 years previously. The mansion was billed as ‘unoccupied in recent years’. The former Bachelors’ Wing, where Wallach had lived with his two housekeepers, appeared less generously appointed than the average four-bedroom house. The principal lure was the 664-acre estate with its 300 acres of arable land and its ‘splendid shooting and fishing’ though, curiously, it was the house itself, a brooding presence seen from across the lake, which the agents chose to illustrate. Did they really think anyone would want to buy it?

XXX


RIGHT: Staircase 1979

BELOW: Staircase 1871


ABOVE: 17th century plasterwork of the gallery 1963

RIGHT: The Napoleonic fireplace in the drawing room 1963

excited by the prospect of going through the process for a second time.

Demolition did eventually begin in the summer of 1972 in the wake of a sale of significant fixtures and fittings. Fireplaces, marble cladding, a doorcase associated with Cockerell’s dining room and, most importantly, the timberwork of the great staircase had been bought, the latter by the specialist conservationist firm Donald Insall Associates.

One of Donald Insall’s colleagues was the Dublin-based conservation architect John Redmill. He first visited The Grange one afternoon in April 1971. What he experienced was a mixture of Cockerell-like wonder at the building and its location, mingled with despair at the sight of the place ‘languishing and utterly abandoned’. He decided that something must be done ‘despite finding out that everyone including all the conversation societies and experts had totally washed their hands of it’.

This latter point was a little harsh. The ruling by the Historic Buildings Council had not been taken lightly. Nor was it the opinion of everyone within important lobby groups such as the Victorian Society that The

Grange merited preservation. A notable dissenter was the architect and architectural historian John Brandon-Jones, Vice-President of the society, whose masterpiece, the offices of Hampshire County Council (1959), was only a few miles away in Winchester.

The first of The Grange buildings to be removed in August 1972 were, historically and aesthetically, the least important: Smirke’s 1820s west wing and Cox’s 1869-71 bachelors’ wing beyond the old conservatory. What remained, standing in proud juxtaposition to one another, were Wilkins’s temple and Cockerell’s gentler echo of it.

XXX

The temple would have gone too had it not been for a remarkable turn of events in the first ten days of September 1972. On 9 September an exhibition opened in London entitled The Age of Neo-Classicism. Staged jointly by the Royal Academy and the Victoria & Albert Museum, the exhibition was sponsored by the Council of Europe as part of the Heath government’s preparations for Britain’s entry into the EEC. The Grange featured in the

architectural section, so it perhaps comes as no surprise that a week before the opening, the first shot was fired in what, in retrospect, appears to have been a carefully co-ordinated media campaign.

This was still an age in which the great and the good of the nation conversed with one another through the correspondence pages of The Times. On 2 September the paper’s lead letter addressed The Grange’s imminent demolition. ‘An outstanding building doomed’ ran the headline. The following Monday The Times published an interview with John Baring accompanied by a large aerial photograph of The Grange taken before demolition work had begun. ‘I do not particularly want to let it go,’ he told reporter Penny Symon, ‘but there is nothing sensible I can do about it. This is a derelict house which is beyond repair. It is riddled with dry rot and something of a joke and I estimate that it would cost me about a quarter to half a million pounds to put it right.’ As to whether he had thought of raising a fund to preserve the building for some future use, he was frank in his admission that he did not want residents or some corporate organisation slap bang in the middle of his estate.

It was for this reason that he had rejected an offer from Christopher Buxton of ‘Period and Country Houses’ to buy The Grange on a 99-year-lease, in order, as Buxton put it in a letter to The Times on 6 September, ‘to restore the most important part as a residence at out own expense’. It was a somewhat disingenuous letter since nowhere did it explicitly state that Buxton’s intention was to convert The Grange into luxury apartments. Albury Park, the Surrey mansion of Henry Drummond, the man who commissioned the Wilkins temple, had been bought by the Country House Association in 1970 for just such a purpose. But Albury was no Grange; the estate was smaller, less valuable agriculturally, and a good deal less remote.

The Times correspondence continued for several days, beginning with a brief but distinguished contribution from the poet and engraver Laurence Whistler:

Because of its strong simplicity and resemblance to a Greek temple, the shell of a classical building loses less than one in a more elaborate and obviously domestic style. It would keep its grandeur and dignity. As a last resort, to save the portico alone would be better than nothing.

297296 The GranGe ParT eLeVenNew wine in an old bottle

softened the outline of the block and acted as an efficient acoustic shield.

George Christie’s advice to the Grange Park team was to build from the inside out; in other words, to begin centre stage from the point at which the singer addresses the audience. He also suggested that it is best to build the building you want and worry about the acoustics later. It took several years before Wasfi (who had written a paper on acoustics as part of her Oxford degree) and Michael Moody were happy with the acoustic they had created. The orchestra pit was a particular concern. They generally are unless they can be electronically raised or lowered, as was first the case in Karajan’s pioneering 1960 Grosses Festspielhaus in Salzburg. At The Grange it was a question of experimenting with carpeting and concrete, wooden flooring and overhead ceiling panels. At one point, acoustician and friend Colin Beak, the man who put the flying saucers into the Royal Albert Hall, was called in. For the most part, however, Michael and Wasfi simply listened to the building, ironing out problems as they were pointed out to them. The advantage of this was that there was no need to lie awake at night worrying about consultant acousticians and their hefty invoices.

XXX

All manner of people had input into the building. It was corporate restructuring expert Simon Freakley, a member of the Grange Park Opera Board, who looked at the plans and suggested putting boxes on the upper tier; he also suggested projecting the first three rows of the stalls beyond the envelope of the old theatre.

The logistics of designing and installing a balcony and boxes were complex. The balcony itself was made of sections of welded steel so large that, like the original Jones & Clark conservatory, they had to be disassembled to pass down narrow Hampshire lanes and then reassembled on site by Littlehampton Welding.

The model for the design was the exquisite Regency theatre in Bury St Edmunds which Pimlico

Opera had visited in the 1990s. The theatre’s architect, by the happiest of chances, was William Wilkins, a commission he had accepted some 10 years after completing his makeover of The Grange. (Opened in 1819, the theatre was acquired by the National Trust in 1975 and extensively restored in 2005-07.) The task of facing the elegantly curved steel balcony in wood and plaster fell to two of the team’s leading craftsmen, master carpenter Les Lambell and master plasterer Tony Ede. Meanwhile, builder Martin Smith had retired to his library to find the relevant volume by legendary Scottish architect Peter Nicholson on how to make the cleverly hinged ‘jib’ doors which would preserve the purity of the curvature’s external line; a joinery technique developed by Nicholson for use in Georgian and early Victorian gentlemen’s libraries.

The new theatre was riddled with quirky touches, not least its glass-covered under-floor displays. The shards of pottery and glass rescued from the archaeological digs were not unsurprising; the Hornby train set was. It started as a running joke, a colleague spending his lunch hours reading a magazine about steam locomotives and later flights of fancy about building a railway line between the car park and the house. The board meanwhile was pondering how best to record the names of the theatre’s many donors. It was when Hornby’s chairman Neil Johnson told Wasfi that his company had enjoyed an unusually profitable year that the idea was born of putting the donors’ names on a fully landscaped under-floor Hornby train set. For £12,000 you were commemorated by a carriage; for £500,000 by an entire village.

In the early years of Grange Park Opera the restaurant areas within the mansion were used to display art and sculpture, even on one occasion a collection of antique rugs. One of the earliest displays was an exhibition Grange Park and Arcadia by the great contemporary master of large-scale watercolour Alexander Creswell, whose prose evocation of the abandoned house, drawn from his recollections of a

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RIGHT: Xx

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