Wrest Park is a country

estate Estate or The Estate may refer to: Law * Estate (law), a term in common law for a person's property, entitlements and obligations * Estates of the realm, a broad social category in the histories of certain countries. ** The Estates, representat ...

located in

Silsoe Silsoe is a village and civil parish in Bedfordshire, England. The village used to be on the main A6 road but a bypass around the village was opened in 1981 at a cost of £1.6m. History Origin The village name is derived from the Danish word ...

, Bedfordshire, England. It comprises Wrest Park, a Grade I listed

country house An English country house is a large house or mansion in the English countryside. Such houses were often owned by individuals who also owned a town house. This allowed them to spend time in the country and in the city—hence, for these peopl ...

, and Wrest Park Gardens, also Grade I listed, formal gardens surrounding the

mansion A mansion is a large dwelling house. The word itself derives through Old French from the Latin word ''mansio'' "dwelling", an abstract noun derived from the verb ''manere'' "to dwell". The English word '' manse'' originally defined a property l ...

History

Thomas Carew (1595–1640) wrote his

country house poem A country house poem is a poem in which the author compliments a wealthy patron or a friend through a description of his country house. Such poems were popular in early 17th-century England. The genre may be seen as a sub-set of the topographical po ...

"To My Friend G.N. from Wrest" in 1639 that described the old house which was demolished between 1834 and 1840. The present house was built in 1834–39, to designs by its owner Thomas de Grey, 2nd Earl de Grey (1781–1859), an amateur architect and the first president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who was inspired by buildings he had seen on trips to Paris. He based his house on designs published in French architectural books such as Jacques-François Blondel's ''Architecture Française'' (1752). The works were superintended as clerk of works on site by James Clephan, who had been clerk of the works at the Liddell seat, Ravensworth Castle in County Durham, and had recently served as professional amanuensis and builder for

Lord Barrington Viscount Barrington, of Ardglass in the County of Down, was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It was created in 1720 for the lawyer, theologian and politician John Barrington. He was made Baron Barrington, of Newcastle in the County of Limeri ...

. Although Nikolaus Pevsner previously stated that Clephan was a French architect who designed the present house instead of De Grey the amateur architect, as Charles Read has shown in his biography of De Grey, Clephan (born Clapham) in fact only produced drawings of the service infrastructure, such as plumbing and drainage. The decorative layout and features of the house were produced by De Grey's own hand. Wrest has some of the earliest Rococo Revival interiors in England. Reception rooms in the house are open to the public. Nan Ino Cooper ran Wrest Park as a military hospital during World War I, though a fire in September 1916 halted this usage of the house. Following the death of her brother Auberon Herbert, 9th Baron Lucas, she inherited his title and the house and sold it in 1918. It was sold after the War to Mr JG Murray, who was associated with cricket in Bedfordshire. During his 18-year tenure, much of the garden statuary was sold, while extensive felling stripped park and garden of many of their oldest trees. He sold it to

Sun Alliance Insurance Sun Alliance Group plc was a large insurance business with its main offices in the City of London and later Horsham. It was created in 1959 by the merger of Sun Insurance, founded in 1710, and Alliance Assurance founded in 1824. In 1996 Sun Allia ...

in 1939, and after the Second World War it became a centre for modern agricultural engineering research. English Heritage took over the house and gardens in 2006 and began a 20-year restoration project to return the gardens to their pre-1917 state.

Wrest Park Gardens

Wrest Park has an early eighteenth-century garden, spread over , which was probably originally laid out by George London and Henry Wise for Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent, then modified for his granddaughter Jemima, 2nd Marchioness Grey by

Lancelot "Capability" Brown Lancelot Brown (born c. 1715–16, baptised 30 August 1716 – 6 February 1783), more commonly known as Capability Brown, was an English gardener and landscape architect, who remains the most famous figure in the history of the English la ...

in a more informal landscape style. The park is divided by a wide gravel central walk, continued as a long canal that leads to a

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

pavilion banqueting house designed by

Thomas Archer Thomas Archer (1668–1743) was an English Baroque architect, whose work is somewhat overshadowed by that of his contemporaries Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor. His buildings are important as the only ones by an English Baroque architec ...

and completed in 1711. The garden designer Batty Langley was employed in the 1730s. The interior of the pavilion is decorated with an impressive Ionic columns in trompe-l'œil. Boundary canals were altered to take the more natural shape by Capability Brown, who worked there between 1758 and 1760, and who also ringed the central formal area with a canal and woodland. The gardens and garden houses were mapped by John Rocque in 1735. During the later 18th and 19th centuries, an orangery and marble fountains were added. The Bathhouse (sometimes referred to as a Roman bath, a hermitage and a grotto) was built, and its grounds laid out, between about 1769 and 1772. In 1736

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 ...

visited Wrest on a progress through Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. He noted monuments in the garden in memory of the Duke of Kent's children who all predeceased him, as well as a monument to Kent himself, at that time still alive. A Wellingtonia planted in 1856 was in its earlier years brought into the house annually to serve as a

Christmas tree A Christmas tree is a decorated tree, usually an evergreen conifer, such as a spruce, pine or fir, or an artificial tree of similar appearance, associated with the celebration of Christmas. The custom was further developed in early modern ...

, one of the earliest surviving examples known in the U.K.

Restoration programme

In the autumn of 2007 English Heritage announced that the Wolfson Foundation had pledged up to £400,000 towards the restoration of a number of the key features of the Wrest Park estate, including the mansion's formal entrance area, the garden statuary, railings and gates, and to alter the height of the carriage drive. In the next phases the lakes and canals will be restored. On 12 September 2008 English Heritage unveiled extensive plans to restore the Grade-I-listed Wrest Park house and gardens to their original splendour. In 2008 the music video for " The Fear" by Lily Allen featured interior as well as exterior scenes of Wrest Park. In July 2010 English Heritage announced that it had secured over £1m from the Heritage Lottery Fund to develop a new visitors centre, car parking, exhibition space and accessible paths. Work was completed in summer 2011 and the park opened to the public on 4 August 2011. English Heritage and Historic England have undertaken a number of indepth investigations of the gardens at Wrest as part of the restoration process, including

archaeological Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscap ...

and geophysical surveys. The removal of an overgrown yew hedge, which maps suggested existed in 1717, led to a

dendrochronological Dendrochronology (or tree-ring dating) is the scientific method of dating tree rings (also called growth rings) to the exact year they were formed. As well as dating them, this can give data for dendroclimatology, the study of climate and atmos ...

investigation on the trunks to discover if the trees removed were original or part of later re-plantings. The wood was found to date to 1780–1800.

Capability Brown memorial

There is a memorial column dedicated to

. It was originally placed near the Bowling Green House, which was remodelled by Batty Langley in 1735, but is now located in the eastern part of the gardens. The column has the inscription: "These gardens, originally laid out by Henry Duke of Kent, were altered by Philip Earl of Hardwicke and Jemima, Marchioness Grey with the professional assistance of Lancelot Brown Esq. in the years 1758, 1759, 1760."

Filming

Wrest Park has been used as a location for filming and events including: the video for the 2008 song " The Fear" by Lily Allen; a 2015 concert by

Status Quo is a Latin phrase meaning the existing state of affairs, particularly with regard to social, political, religious or military issues. In the sociological sense, the ''status quo'' refers to the current state of social structure and/or values. W ...

; ''

Strictly Come Dancing ''Strictly Come Dancing'' (informally known as ''Strictly'') is a British dance contest show in which celebrities partner with professional dancers to compete in mainly ballroom and Latin dance. Each couple is scored by a panel of usually 4 ...

'' ,"The People's Strictly for Comic Relief", which aired in 2015; and a 2016 episode of BBC's ''

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''.

Notes

External links

{{Commons category, Wrest Park
Wrest Park's page at English Heritage Heritage Lottery fund announcement July 2010
Gardens in Bedfordshire Country houses in Bedfordshire Tourist attractions in Bedfordshire English Heritage sites in Bedfordshire Grade I listed houses Grade I listed buildings in Bedfordshire Grade I listed garden and park buildings Gardens by Capability Brown Rococo architecture in England