The West Walled Garden Bartlow Park Including Teak Glass House, Potting Shed, Boiler Room, Tunnel and Bunker, Bartlow, Cambridgeshire

Description

BARTLOW

1612/0/10007 The West Walled Garden Bartlow Park i
04-APR-06 ncluding teak glass house, potting she
d, boiler room, tunnel and bunker

II
Glass house by Wrinch & Sons. Glass, teak and iron frame on a brick plinth. Hip-roofed teak house or plant house with a central show house in the form of a gabled projection. Rectangular in plan, it measures 24.5m in length by 5.1m at each end. The central show house projects slightly forward and has open tanks of water heated by pipes beneath the floor covered by iron gratings, suggesting that this was a very warm, moist house for tropical exotics such as orchids. There is good survival of original cast iron components, such as vents, locks, winding gears, brackets, gratings, purlins, truss rods and gutters, as well as the original glass, with few panes missing. There are two extensions behind, one in brick (a potting shed / office) and one glazed. This is north-facing and would have suited orchids requiring heat but not direct sunlight. The brick potting shed has a fireplace, two windows and a tiled roof, from which projects a brick chimney with ornamental projecting brickwork, similar in design to the stacks on the gardener's bungalow situated to the north-west of the walled garden. There is a gravelled terrace in front of the plant house.

The boiler room beneath the potting shed is reached by steps from the back path to the rear of the teak house. It is brick-built and lit by a lunette window in the east wall. There is a semi-circular recess in the south wall which took part of the boiler and flues into the glass house beyond. The boiler has been removed but some of the mountings survive. Along the north side of the boiler house is a brick-lined tunnel, opening on the south side at the east end into the boiler house and running for some 45m to the coal bunker at its west end. It is high enough for a man to stand upright in and still contains the remains of a truck. A single rail track runs along its length. The coal bunker at the west end of the tunnel is surrounded by a high brick wall, with semi-circular coping bricks and brick piers built in the same style as the garden walls with which it is contemporary. The bunker is entered from the west end via a pair of wooden full-height doors.
The walls around the western enclosure are between 3-3.5 m in height and built in pinkish-grey brick with flat stone copings. The walls are supported at regular intervals by piers. The dividing wall between the eastern and western enclosures is older and has a flint base. The doors in the walls are arched, with piers on either side. They are fitted with wrought iron gates and fans, with hinges and latches set in stone. The paths shown on the 1921 OS map are no longer visible but are probably concealed beneath the turf.

History:
The site was once the kitchen garden of Bartlow House, a C19 mansion destroyed by fire in 1947 and replaced in 1964 by Bartlow Park on a new site to the east of the original mansion. The First Edition OS map of 1877 shows the original house close to the main village street with its park to the east and south. South-west of the park is an enclosure containing a quite large free-standing glasshouse with a shed/boiler house behind, and a second enclosure to the south. Part of the wall between the two enclosures appears to be of 'crinkle-crankle' or serpentine design (later demolished). This area was reached from the house by a track running along the western edge of a narrow strip of woodland or pleasure grounds, through which ran a path from the house terminating at a large Roman burial mound adjacent to the Great Eastern Railway line (the mound is part of a cemetery which is a scheduled monument). The estate was purchased in 1899 by the Revd. Charles Henry Brocklebank (1864 1935), the fourth son of the 1st Baronet Brocklebank. The Brocklebanks were a wealthy Liverpool shipping family with interests not only in Cunard but also in the Suez Canal, railways, insurance and banks. Brocklebank became an enterprising and experimental agriculturalist and farmer, with over 1000 acres of lands and pedigree herds of sheep and cattle. On acquiring the estate, he set about improving the house, creating model kennels, cottages, farm buildings and a larger kitchen garden. He was an exact contemporary of A.C. Blomfield and his father the architect Sir Arthur William Blomfield is known to have advised Brocklebank when he was vicar at Pampisford. It is not known if he (or his better known cousin Reginald Blomfield) advised Brocklebank on the design of the Bartlow gardens.

The OS map of 1903 shows the enclosure to the south of glasshouse cleared, the southern part now forming a larger part of the kitchen garden. A second glasshouse is shown to the west of the first one, with an extension (?boiler house) behind and small shed on west wall. The gardens were enlarged in 1905 with the purchase of further land to the west to accommodate a fully walled garden (the western enclosure). To this phase belong most of the garden walls, the teak house with its tunnel and boiler and the bungalow to house the head gardener located to the north-west of the garden. Stylistically, the peach house and 'pool' in the eastern enclosure are likely to be of this phase, though they do not appear on any map until 1978.

The estate was sold in 1935 to Lord de Ramsay who never lived there, the land being farmed by his cousin. The mansion was requisitioned by the army in the Second World War, when a bomb fell on the north wall of the garden, destroying one of the two-span glasshouses in the eastern enclosure. The old mansion was burnt down 1947. In 1962, the estate passed to the current owners and a new house, Bartlow Park, was built on a site to the east of the original. Part of the garden continued to be cultivated and Christmas trees were planted in the rest of the space. In 2002, the part of the estate including the gardens was sold off from Bartlow Park, separating the kitchen gardens from the house.

Sources:
Campbell, S., The Walled Kitchen Garden, Bartlow Park, Bartlow, unpublished report, 2003

Summary of Importance:
The western walled enclosure of Bartlow kitchen gardens forms a discrete entity and although relatively late in date, fulfils the criteria for listing as it survives with most of its original features intact, including an impressive teak house of interesting design associated with a remarkable 45m long coal tunnel, possibly unique in a garden of this size.

External Links

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