Batty Langley (''baptised'' 14 September 1696 – 3 March 1751) was an English garden designer, and prolific writer who produced a number of engraved designs for " Gothick" structures, summerhouses and garden seats in the years before the mid-18th century. An eccentric landscape designer, he gave four of his sons the names Hiram, Euclid, Vitruvius and

Archimedes Archimedes of Syracuse (;; ) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists ...

. He published extensively, and attempted to "improve"

Gothic Gothic or Gothics may refer to: People and languages *Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes **Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths **Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...

forms by giving them classical proportions. BattyLangleygarden

Early life

Langley was baptised in Twickenham, Middlesex, the son of a jobbing gardener Daniel Langley and his wife Elizabeth. He bore the name of David Batty, one of his father's patrons. He started worked as a gardener, inheriting some of his father's clients in Twickenham, then a village of suburban villas within easy reach of London by a pleasant water journey on the Thames. An early client was Thomas Vernon of Twickenham Park. He married Anne Smith in February 1719. They had four children, but she died in June 1726. He had ten further children with his second wife, Catherine.

Landscape gardening

Langley moved into surveying and landscape gardening. He published his first book, ''Practical Geometry'', in 1726. Inspired by Switzer's ''Ichnographia Rustica'' of 1718, Langley advocated more irregular, informal gardens, with rococo "arti-natural" landscaping. His sinuous forms predated William Hogarth's line of beauty. For the Palladian house built at Twickenham by James Johnston in 1710 (later Orleans House, demolished 1926), Langley, probably on his own endeavour, prepared and published a garden plan, which offered an encyclopaedia of the garden features that were swiftly becoming obsolete by the time the plan was published in Langley's ''A Sure Method of Improving Estates'' (1728): here are several

maze A maze is a path or collection of paths, typically from an entrance to a goal. The word is used to refer both to branching tour puzzles through which the solver must find a route, and to simpler non-branching ("unicursal") patterns that lea ...

s, a "

wilderness Wilderness or wildlands (usually in the plural), are natural environments on Earth that have not been significantly modified by human activity or any nonurbanized land not under extensive agricultural cultivation. The term has traditionally re ...

" with many tortuous path-turnings, garden rooms or ''cabinets de verdure'' cut into dense woodland, formal stretches of garden canal and formally shaped basins of water, some with central fountains, and a central allée of trees leading to an exedra. His ''New Principles of Gardening'' (1728) included designs for mazes, a feature he could never quite leave behind, with 28 plates engraved by his brother Thomas. He also published ''A Sure Method of Improving Estates'' (1728) and ''Pomona'' (1729). He also undertook work at Castle Howard in North Yorkshire and Wrest Park in Bedfordshire.

Architecture

Langley moved from Twickenham to London in 1729, and shifted again from landscape gardening to architecture. Working near

Exeter Change The Exeter Exchange (signed and popularly known as Exeter Change) was a building on the north side of the Strand in London, with an arcade extending partway across the carriageway. It is most famous for the menagerie that occupied its upper floo ...

in the Strand, he published ''A Sure Guide to Builders'' in 1729. He moved to Westminster in the 1730s, where he started to teach drawing, geometry, architecture, and garden design, and continued to teach when he moved to Soho in 1738. He also made and sold stone garden ornaments. Despite his literary aspirations, and advertisements in architectural journals, he secured few commissions, submitting an unsolicited proposal for the competition to design a new Mansion House in 1735 and a design for a new Westminster Bridge in 1736-7. He inclined strongly towards a home-grown English architectural form, publishing articles in the Grub Street Journal under the pseudonym "Hiram" from July 1734 to March 1735, praising Gothic architecture (or as he termed it "native Saxon") and rejecting the "imported"

Palladian architecture Palladian architecture is a European architectural style derived from the work of the Venetian architect Andrea Palladio (1508–1580). What is today recognised as Palladian architecture evolved from his concepts of symmetry, perspective and ...

favoured by Lord Burlington and his circle. He published a wide range of architectural books, from a huge folio on ''Ancient Masonry'' in parts from 1733 to 1736 with over 450 plates, through ''The Builder's Complete Assistant'' of 1738 (also known as ''The Builder's Complete Chest-Book'') and ''The Builder's Jewel'' of 1741, to the tiny ''The Workman's Golden Rule'' in 1750, in vicesimo-quarto. He is best known for one of his confident self-promotions, ''Ancient Architecture, Restored, and Improved'' published in 1742 and reissued in 1747 as ''Gothic Architecture, improved by Rules and Proportions'', a bit of cockscombry that thoroughly irritated

Horace Walpole Horatio Walpole (), 4th Earl of Orford (24 September 1717 – 2 March 1797), better known as Horace Walpole, was an English writer, art historian, man of letters, antiquarian, and Whigs (British political party), Whig politician. He had Strawb ...

, whose Gothick villa at Twickenham,

Strawberry Hill Strawberry Hill may refer to: United Kingdom *Strawberry Hill, London, England **Strawberry Hill House, Horace Walpole's Gothic revival villa **Strawberry Hill railway station United States *Strawberry Hill (San Francisco), California *Strawberry ...

, gave impetus to the stirrings of the

Gothic Revival Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

All that his books achieved, has been to teach carpenters to massacre that venerable species, and to give occasion to those who know nothing of the matter, and who mistake his clumsy efforts for real imitations, to censure the productions of our ancestors, whose bold and beautiful fabrics Sir
Christopher Wren Sir Christopher Wren PRS FRS (; – ) was one of the most highly acclaimed English architects in history, as well as an anatomist, astronomer, geometer, and mathematician-physicist. He was accorded responsibility for rebuilding 52 churches ...
viewed and reviewed with astonishment, and never mentioned without esteem. (Walpole, ''Anecdotes of Painting'', 1798, p 484)

His book, with engravings by his brother Thomas, attempted to improve Gothic forms by giving them classical proportions and to create a scheme of architectural orders for Gothic architecture. He provided inspiration for elements of buildings from Great Fulford and Hartland Abbey in Devon, to

Speedwell Castle Speedwell Castle is a mid-18th-century house at the centre of Brewood, Staffordshire, between Wolverhampton and Stafford. Described by Pevsner as a "peach" and a "delectable folly", it stands beside the village market place, at the head of a T- ...

in Brewood in Staffordshire, and Tissington Hall in Derbyshire, and the Gothic temple at Bramham Park in Yorkshire, and gates at Castletown House in County Kildare. Langley's books were also enormously influential in Britain's American colonies. At Mount Vernon, for example,

George Washington George Washington (February 22, 1732, 1799) was an American military officer, statesman, and Founding Father who served as the first president of the United States from 1789 to 1797. Appointed by the Continental Congress as commander of th ...

relied upon plate 51 of Langley's ''The City and Country Builder's and Workman's Treasury of Designs'' as the source for the famous Venetian (or Palladian) window in the dining room; upon plate 54 of the same book for the ocular window on Mount Vernon's western facade; and upon plate 75 of Langley's ''The Builder's Jewel'' for the rusticated wood siding. Batty Langley was also thought to be an important

Freemason Freemasonry or Masonry refers to fraternal organisations that trace their origins to the local guilds of stonemasons that, from the end of the 13th century, regulated the qualifications of stonemasons and their interaction with authorities ...

; his naming of his son Hiram was a reference to the architect, prominent in Masonic tradition and symbolism, of Solomon's Temple, and many of his books were dedicated to his Masonic brethren. The ''frontispiece'' to ''The Builder's Jewel'' (1741), for example, contains many examples of Masonic symbolism found in the first three degrees of Freemasonry. He was imprisoned for debt in

Newgate Prison Newgate Prison was a prison at the corner of Newgate Street and Old Bailey Street just inside the City of London, England, originally at the site of Newgate, a gate in the Roman London Wall. Built in the 12th century and demolished in 1904, t ...

and wrote an account of that institution, ''An Accurate Description of Newgate''. He died at home in Soho.

References

The Twickenham Museum:
Batty Langley
University of Rochester Book of the Month: Batty Langley, ''New Principles of Gardening'', 1728
Detailed illustrated report. * "Batty Langley: A Tutor to Freemasons (1696-1751)", Eileen Harris, The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 119, No. 890 (May 1977), pp. 327–333+335, Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/878768 {{DEFAULTSORT:Langley, Batty 1696 births 1751 deaths English landscape architects English gardeners Landscape or garden designers British garden writers People imprisoned for debt Freemasons of the Premier Grand Lodge of England