Garden writers of the mid-seventeenth century provided copious advice on the best situations for prospect, soil and shelter from wind, but not on design. So who devised the layout of the gardens?

Garden writers addressed their books to landowners who would be building or improving their country residences. Such owners would be used to overseeing the setting out and enclosure of fields and garden grounds themselves. The content and tone of the gardening books, coupled with the virtual absence of relevant advice in the architectural treatises, suggests that masterminding fine gardens around a house was one of the accomplishments expected of the owner himself.

The first executed work in architecture of François-Joseph Belanger (1744–1818) — one of the most important neo-classical architects of late Ancien-Régime France — was a bath-house for the Comte de Lauraguais. It was built in one of France’s earliest jardins anglais, which Lauraguais had laid out in the grounds of his Paris residence, the Hôtel de Brancas, on the rue de l’Université. It is one of Belanger’s most familiar works, not least because his own drawings and description survive to record it. This wealth of documentation makes it a uniquely knowable example of Belanger’s architecture in the first decade of his professional life, before the construction of the Comte d’Artois’ folie of Bagatelle, upon which much of his reputation rests.

John Newman’s two volumes on Kent in the Buildings of England series are indispensable for anyone interested in the architectural history of the county. Many buildings have only ever been published in these books, which form a basic framework on which all further modern studies can be built. The nature of the series means that vernacular buildings only receive brief mention, and although eight are noted in Boughton Monchelsea, a recent opportunity to look at that parish in more detail has revealed interesting points which are discussed here. This essay is offered as a tribute to the author of an excellent county guide, which we who live in Kent are lucky to have and use on a daily basis.

The definitive historical study of the circumstances surrounding the creation of the village of Nuneham Courtenay, a few miles south-east of Oxford, was published more than thirty years ago. In a wide-ranging essay Mavis Batey recounted how the first Earl Harcourt, founding President of the Dilettanti Society, embarked in 1761 on the creation of an appropriate landscape garden to complement the setting of his newly completed classical villa. An essential preliminary to the landscaping was the necessity to remove the medieval village out of sight of views of the house, and as early as 1760 work had already begun on building a new settlement outside the confines of the park. Progress was rapid, and by the autumn of 1761 the new estate village placed astride the Oxford-Henley turnpike was a going concern (Fig. 1). There is little to add to Mrs Batey’s account of the controversy that accompanied this arrogant display of the power exercised by eighteenth-century landlords over the lives of their tenantry apart from taking the opportunity to record that her own further research has confirmed the tentative identification of Nuneham with Oliver Goldsmith’s critical poem The Deserted Village. An entry in the manuscript notebooks of Beilby Porteus, Bishop of London, recording a visit to Lord Harcourt on 20 August 1800, reads:

Among the many architectural splendours of Sevenoaks, it would be easy to overlook the Sevenoaks Tenants estate. The houses are small and unpretending, varying in manner from ordinary ‘Edwardian urban vernacular’ to low-key arts-and-crafts. They are also spread out over a wide area, from the centre of the town to the villages of Shoreham and Kemsing to the north and Sevenoaks Weald to the south, and so do not form what we would immediately recognize as an ‘estate’. Yet, in their way, these houses are as remarkable as Knole or Ightham Mote. They are the last ‘working’ survivors of a housing movement that before the First World War aspired to transform not just the way housing was provided for the working classes, but also the way they lived, and by extension, wider society beyond.

John Newman ends the introduction to his account of Monmouth in his fine new volume in the Buildings of Wales series by observing that the building of the by-pass in the 1960s, while essential to the survival of the town, unfortunately cut it off from the River Wye, its economic life-blood in previous centuries. But the Wye and its tributary the Monnow, which hold Monmouth in a tight grip, have done more than give the town its livelihood, as recent experience has once again reminded its citizens.