Chiswick House & Gardens 1988
I think we managed to get most of our students together at Kew Bridge after our walk along Brentford Riverside to take the train for the single stop to Chiswick, from where we walked the third of a mile or so to Chiswick House Gardens.
As it says on the web site, “Chiswick House and Gardens is one of the most glorious examples of 18th-century British architecture and landscaped gardens, with over 300 years of discovery, inspiration and delight.” The house and gardens were created between 1725 and about 1738 by William Kent working for his friend Richard Boyle, the third Earl of Burlington and represent the birth of the English Landscape Movement and the house one of the finest examples of neo-Palladian architecture in England.
I don’t think we told the students a great deal about this, but we had showed them some pictures before the outing, including some fine photographs by Bill Brandt and Edwin Smith, and perhaps even some of my own.
Over the years the grounds and the house had deteriorated and before it had been sold to Middlesex County Council in 1929 had been a mental health institution. The house was taken over by the Ministry of Works (now English Heritage) in 1948, and they embarked on a major project to restore both house and gardens to their original state.
The gardens at the time of our visit in 1988 were in parts rather less restored than they are now, and I think access was a little less restricted and we could wander freely around them. The park is open free of charge to the public every day and is well worth a visit. Back in 1988 there were relatively few visitors and apart from our group they were mainly locals walking their dogs. Now after another major restoration with £12m of national lottery money and a new café completed in 2012 it gets rather more visitors.
The café was the London Building of the year in 2011, and the ‘artisan’ food isn’t bad if you like that sort of thing, though back in 1988 we brought sandwiches.
We didn’t get all of the students back to catch the train home from Chiswick station on any of the occasions we took them there. I think this may have been the year when police held two of them as they ran across the park to try and get to the train on time and held them for several hours without allowing them to contact anyone. But normally when we took students out some would disappear and go clubbing in London, coming back bleary-eyed to college the following morning to sleep in our lessons.