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by Ted Howell |
A Regency House and Garden
| The house was built into an ancient well-managed agricultural landscape.
Pastures, surrounded by belts of mature trees and shrubs to give shelter
to livestock, were interspersed with extensive apple orchards. Most
of this pre-industrial landscape was wiped away by the late nineteenth
century expansion of Southall. Today a vestige can still be seen between
Tenterlow Lane and Osterley Park, although now the pastures are mostly
playing fields and the orchards have given way to natural thickets
and plantations. |
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The prevalent fashion for larger gardens and landscapes in the Georgian
and Regency periods was that of the ‘English Landscape Movement’
as interpreted by Humphrey Repton, the world’s first self-professed
landscape gardener. Repton’s designs were to be immortalised
in the lay-out British (and American) public parks - extensive lawns
with specimen trees and shrubs, sweeping gravel drives and walkways,
an enclosing belt of native and exotic trees and the terrace from
which this naturalistic landscape was admired. Shrubberies and flower
borders were not neglected – beds displaying the most recent
introductions from the Americas were laid-out near the house and the
whole would be peppered with statuary and garden structures in either
the ‘Classic’ or ‘Gothic’ mode.
Smaller properties (less than five acres) were landscaped on a less
dramatic scale.
If there was no room for terraces and sweeping drives,
the garden could be fashionably laid-out with shrubs, small trees
(kept small by regular pruning or ‘pollarding’) and statuary
to produce a ‘Picturesque’ composition (Picturesque –
the term coined by William Gilpin in the mid eighteenth century to
describe landscape views ‘ suitable as the subject of a landscape
painter’) |
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The earliest depiction of Friars lawn is on the 1816 Parish map (drawn
up to record land ownership after the Enclosure Award of 1815). The
curtilage of the house and surrounding properties are the same as
shown on the 1865 OS. Map (approximately one-third of an hectare or
just under one acre). Unfortunately no details of the garden are shown
on this map as these were of little interest to the auditors and surveyors
who drew up the Enclosure Bills.
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