Chiswick House & Gardens: On Wednesday 1st November 1989 I took the train to Chiswick and walked around the gardens of Chiswick House, making a brief detour to the Thames at Chiswick Mall and then returning to the gardens and then walking back to the station.
It was a place we often took our photography students for a day’s outings early in their one or two year course, a public park where they could wander freely and safely with a brief to take pictures. The park is owned by the London Borough of Hounslow and surrounds the house and the gardens are open every day and free to enter, but English Heritage charge for entry to the house. We never took the students inside.
The obelisk was erected here in 1732, but the classical sculpture on the base is much older, and had been given to Lord Burlington in 1712. It was replaced by a copy in 2006, with the original now inside the house.
The gardens changed greatly over the years as Lord Burlington and his friend William Kent who had helped in design the house in a neo-Palladian style – completed in 1729 – put in their ideas. Kent later became largely responsible for the gardens, which are one of the earliest examples of a grand English landscape garden.
But this bridge only arrived after Burlington’s death in 1753, added in 1774 to the designs of James Wyatt for Georgiana Spencer, the wife of William Cavendish, 5th Duke of Devonshire who then owned the property. It is over the Bollo Brook which runs through the gardens and was used to fill its lakes and run fountains, but later became too polluted so was culverted under the lake to continue towards the Thames close to Chiswick Bridge.
The house was probably never a comfortable place to live, having been designed primarily as a place to show off the considerable classical purchases Burlington had acquire during his three ‘Grand Tours’ as a young man and to demonstrate his devotion to the architectural ideas of Andrea Palladio which had begun on his tour of the Venice region in 1719.
Development of the gardens continued under the Cavendish family, including the building of a 300ft long conservatory in 1813 for the cultivation of camelias, then incredibly expensive and thought to be tender plants – though they grow quite well in the icy winters of Japan and the Himalayas. A formal garden in an Italian style was built around it. But this formal arrangement of hedges dates from Burlingtons own plans for the garden with vistas and statuary and columns.
The Cavendish family let out the property to various tenants and in 1892 it became a mental hospital for wealthy patients, the Chiswick Asylum until 1929 when it was sold to Middlesex County Council. After war damage the house became run by the Ministry of Works in 1948, latter English Heritage and in 2005 they formed the Chiswick House and Gardens Trust with Hounslow Council to bring management of house and gardens together.
I’d visited the house and gardens at intervals over the years, often with my family, and by 1989 the gardens were in rather better shape having been rather let go a little wild in some earlier years. On Flickr there is a very different picture taken from more or less the same viewpoint in 1978, and you can also find more pictures from a visit with my family in 1984 and with students in 1988.
I think this is another classical relic in at the entrance front of the house.
An urn in a very formal garden area. The next frame on Flickr shows the entire urn. I also made a very similar image in colour.
During the day there I made over 60 black and white exposures of the house and gardens, but most were rather similar to pictures I had made in earlier years and so I haven’t bothered to digitise them.
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