SHRUBLAND PARK is one of the most imposing of Suffolk's country houses – a great nineteenth-century Italianate pile, with a soaring south tower, perched on the edge of a steep chalk escarpment overlooking the Gipping valley. Its vast park, graced by ancient sweet chestnuts and oaks, adds to the splendour of the setting. But more impressive still are the extensive gardens, terraced and balustraded, laid out on two levels above and below the dramatic slope (Fig. 1).

The credit for this imposing ensemble is usually given to Charles Barry, the celebrated architect of the Houses of Parliament and designer of numerous English country houses, who in the 1840s and 50s modified Shrubland Hall and made alterations to the grounds. As early as 1895 he was being recognised as the hall's principal architect. Particulars printed in that year, when the estate was to be let, describe how the building had been ‘greatly enlarged and practically rebuilt in 1851, by the late Sir Charles Barry’. But it is the gardens, in particular, which are usually seen as largely or entirely his work. Typical is the entry for Shrubland in The Oxford Companion to Gardens, which states baldly that ‘the present garden dates from 1851–4, when Sir Charles Barry was called in to make alterations to the house’. This, too, is a long-established view, the 1895 particulars simply describing how the forty acres of gardens and pleasure grounds ‘were laid out by the late Sir Charles Barry’. In reality, plans, illustrations, and correspondence in the Shrubland archives, together with material published in the nineteenth-century gardening press and documents in the Suffolk Record Office, reveal a more complicated story, and show that much that has traditionally been ascribed to Barry has, in reality, rather earlier origins.

The Old Hall

The building which forms the core of the present Shrubland Hall was erected in the 1770s, on a virgin site. The house it replaced survives, in much-altered and truncated form, as the ‘Old Hall’. This building now serves as the residence of Lord de Saumarez, the owner of the estate: Shrubland Hall itself is used as a health clinic. Before examining the history of this latter building, and its grounds, we must first note briefly one of two things about its predecessor.