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10 - A design for life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 May 2024

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Summary

A mostly instrumental long-player record that took its inspiration from the English landscape dominated the album charts in October 1974, and in the week of the opening of the V&A's Destruction of the Country House exhibition. Hergest Ridge was Mike Oldfield's follow-up to the phenomenally successful Tubular Bells, his bestselling debut of 1973. The sleeve of Hergest Ridge featured an aerial shot of the titular landscape feature: a distinctively shaped hill outside Kington in Herefordshire, close to the Welsh border. Oldfield had retreated here, to a house called The Beacon, as a way of coping with his sudden fame and public profile as well as to draw inspiration for his music.

A mile or two from Hergest Ridge, and therefore just off the edge of the aerial photograph on the sleeve of the record, was an equally distinctive country house and garden. Hergest Croft had suffered the depredations of wartime requisition after it was converted to a boarding school for girls. Nevertheless, it had narrowly escaped a listing in the catalogue for the Destruction show, and the family had resumed residence in 1953. In a clear case of nominative determinism, the Banks family made their money in banking (as well as in industry and the law). But successive generations of the family were also keen on banking of a more physical kind: building up the embanked surroundings of their house through plantings of trees and shrubs. William Hartland Banks married Dorothy Alford, daughter of the dean of Canterbury and, like her husband, a talented natural scientist. Together they first laid out the gardens at Hergest Croft in 1895, around the time that the house had been built to a fashionable arts and crafts design. The gardens became known for their exotics and other distinctive plantings: azaleas, cedars, rhododendrons, maples, and birches. The trees planted after the war by William and Dorothy's son Dick Banks, an industrialist and director of ICI, now have national collection status.

Dick's eldest son, Lawrence, made a career in banking, but also had a passionate interest in gardening. The two sides of his life were combined when he became treasurer of the Royal Horticultural Society.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2024

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  • A design for life
  • Ben Cowell
  • Book: The British Country House Revival
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805432883.012
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  • A design for life
  • Ben Cowell
  • Book: The British Country House Revival
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805432883.012
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • A design for life
  • Ben Cowell
  • Book: The British Country House Revival
  • Online publication: 09 May 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781805432883.012
Available formats
×