Niall Hobhouse to Ethel Rae Perkins
Thank you for your letter. I think both the points and the questions that need answering are correct.
As I have said already, I think the issue about a first ‘intuitive’ response has had a good airing in the last week. I still hope that nothing in my ‘process’ will inhibit any designer from working in the way that he or she finds most comfortable.
I don’t want to burden anybody with issues of cost at this point. This is part of the reason why in the anonymous first stage we have asked only for indications of an approach to the project, as represented in imagery and words. The question of cost, and the specifics of the rest of the design requirements, will become only too concrete in due course. It is worth adding, as I said somewhere to Kim Wilkie in the earlier correspondence, that I do believe in a ‘whole of life’ approach to the costing of any project.
You are quite right about the horse-shoe wall. Its interest is in part to do with the oddness of its geometric form as it is laid into the very uneven topography of the site. I think Patrick Taylor’s comments related as much as anything to the very discouraging physical barriers that were imposed in the past between the Main House and the Walled Garden. These did reflect a different attitude to the visitors, and to the management of the Estate. In fact, that part of the garden is as remote as it could conveniently be from the House; it isn’t really possible to see the two together.
My plan for the immediate future is to occupy for my own use only a fairly small part of the House itself, and I already live in another house some way away. It is certainly the intention to re-establish the three or four lines of access between House and Parabola that are suggested by the landscape, planting and walls. Overall, I have to recognize that the Walled Garden has become in the last 30 years an equally, if not more, powerful ‘centre’ to the Estate. I am trying to formalize this revaluation, and want to play with a different overall approach to the Estate that would allow various centres, or points of focus, that balance each other.
On the other hand, there is a fortuitous - but very powerful - relationship between the Walled Garden and the Park and woodland. The area within the wall represents a tiny fraction of this much larger ‘gardened’ landscape. I am certainly very interested in the uneven texture that varying intensities of gardening activity give to any landscape. In this case, I hope that a powerful gardening ’performance’ within the Wall will work as a kind of counterpoint to the wilder spaces outside. In fact, I’d like the executed project to be just as strongly declarative as the effort that is going into formulating it as a project. If it succeeds in this way, it will make some of the decisions about what to do elsewhere, both in the garden proper and in the landscape, much simpler to make. I was always uneasy, for instance, with the Pope’s preference for gardening as intensively outside the Walled Garden proper, as they did inside it. Whenever I was there I felt that the drama inside the wall would have been greater if it had come as a surprise.
It is worth saying therefore, and for the benefit of everybody, that my inclination for the rest of the former ‘public’ garden is to simplify it as much as possible, and my fixed intention is to remove everything from the immediate periphery of the wall itself (service buildings, greenhouses, etc) that get in the way of an appreciation of it both as a wall, and as a shape in the landscape.
I very much appreciate the thought you have put into this, and very glad you are enjoying watching it evolve. I would be very happy to answer any more questions that you raise.