Oddly, views of the main front of Kings Weston house looking up the avenue from The Circle are rare, so, we’re celebrating on hunting down this copy of an early 20th Century postcard. The familiar lime avenue on the left is today accompanied by replacement trees we planted in 2014, but here the house is framed by some of the originals. In the 1760s the rigid formality of the linear avenues had become old fashioned, and the third Edward Southwell who owned the estate took to deformalizing it, creating a more natural landscaped parkland setting for the mansion. Rather than getting rid of all the trees he kept one side of the avenue and thinned-out the south side leaving just a handful scattered in the open grassland. The postcard shows that these survivors were still growing in the 1900s, but must have succumbed soon after.
The recently acquired early 1900s postcard showing the view of the house from The Circle.
It’s also worth noting the grassy carpet leading the eye towards the house is absolutely crammed with flowers, perhaps buttercups or ox-eye daisies. Sadly, a black and white photo does no justice to what the photographer enjoyed on this sunny summer day in the Edwardian era.
The approach to the house from Shirehampton was once dominated by views towards the house, something that the architect Sir John Vanbrugh was keen to emphasise in its design. The arcade of chimneys on the roof were once the first thing seen across the brow of the hill as the rest of the façade gradually revealed itself. By the time the visitor was stood on The Circle the house was perfectly framed by trees, the open circle providing a theatrical open space from which to admire it from.
Drawn by Samuel Loxton in 1920, this view shows on the right the cedar tree on The Circle that’s just been lost. In the foreground the ha-ha with its sunken fence that once surrounded the Circle is seen before being infilled after WWII.
Sadly, since WWII and the growth of self-seeded ash and sycamore, these once inspiring views have been lost, the result being a sense of disconnection between the house, its grounds, and Shirehampton.
Today views from the Circle are impacted by post-war tree growth.
The stair hall in Kings Weston house possesses some lush gilded trompe-l’oeil painted into its alcoves. These, we discovered some time ago, were inspired in about 1716 by printed images by the French architect Jean Lepautre. Edward Southwell who commissioned the house had copies of several volumes of his work, so appears to have set the painter the task of replicating them to decorate his new home. Until now, the origin of one of the paintings has remained a mystery, but one we think we’ve now solved.
The painting is small, occupying the arched head of a door on the first floor of the stair hall and looks less accomplished than those elsewhere. In incorporates weapons, canon, arrows, spears, a shield, banners and the paraphernalia of warfare. One of Lepautre’s designs came to our attention recently but looks rather different. The theme is similar but on a more extravagant scale. However, looking closely you can start to pick out the same various elements as the Kings Weston painting.
It appears that the painter has used the same image as the basis for his work, simplifying and adapting it to fit in the architectural setting he had to work with. Curiously, he seems not to have quite understood some of the things he was painting leading to some odd interpretation. The top of the shield, for example, has some strange bendy detail, and what on earth is the strange sun-shaped thing at the back? Is it supposed to be one of the epaulettes, feathers, or that oddity in Lepautre’s own engraving at the back-left side?
A collection of interesting drawings has caught our attention this month. They were all by the hand of Maria S. Miles (1826-1897) who grew up as Maria Hill at Henbury House to the east of Kingsweston Hill. As her married name suggests, she wed a member of the Miles family, Colonel Charles Miles, for whom Kings Weston was their dynastic home. This gave her private access to the family affairs, house, and parkland, some of which are featured amongst her artistic output.
The trees of Kings Weston seem to have suffered badly from heavy storms and wind, perhaps a bad mix of exposed location and shallow soils. A few months ago we covered the damage caused by a tornado in 1859, but the park was rattled again my a terrible storm in October 1877. Using the envelope for her letter to her husband, Maria Miles illustrated the sorry scene on Shirehampton Road where whole avenues of elm trees were thrown over.
Maria Miles’s drawing of fallen elms on Shirehampton Road, sketched on the envelope of a letter sent to her husband.
The event was reported widely in the local press:
“The full effects of the destructive fury of the gale and the havoc it made among trees can best be seen however Shirehampton Park. The whole line of noble elms on the left side of the road through the park is down. Many of these grand old trees had more than century’s growth in them, and as they lie prostrate present saddening spectacle. Their giant forms have for generations been the admiration of all lovers of well grown trees— now they are broken and torn as some malignant Aeolus had spent his last strength to wrench the favourites from the spot they adorned and fling them in heaps of ruinous wreck to wait for the prosaic attentions of the wood-cutter and the timber merchant. The owner of these fines trees is said to have remarked that he would have rather seen his house down than his trees, inasmuch as could have replaced the one but cannot restore the other, and the same kind of feeling— regret for the picturesque which has been destroyed in a single night—will be common all who have seen the extraordinary results of the storm as they are presented by the uprooted trees in Shirehampton Park. An old Cliftonian assures us that there has been no such scene as that now to be witnessed in the park during the last fifty years.”
The owner of the fine trees was Philip William Skinner Miles. Although he was the heir to the Kings Weston estate he allowed his mother, Clarissa, to continue living at the house until her death in 1868. Instead, he took up residence in Shirehampton where he fitted out Penpole House to his own specification. Maria captures her brother-in-law’s home in 1863 showing the spectacular view of the Severn enjoyed across the western lawn, and the rambling house and gardens in the foreground. Sadly, this house that once sat below Penpole Point, was demolished after WWII and is now the site of Penpole Close at the bottom of Penpole Lane.
Penpole House, looking north towards views of the Severn in 1863.
A short train passes along horseshoe Bend, below the parkland, in 1883.
Curiously, Maria appears to have had an interest in the family’s industrial exploits too. She records the SS Great Britain and SS Great Western, two ships in which the family held interests, and paints an early view of the Bristol Port and Pier Railway from the Powder House on the Avon. The view shows the massive slice of bank that was taken out of Shirehampton Park and a short train making its way towards Shirehampton in September 1883, eight years after the line opened. The tree-lined parkland setting above was to be assaulted twice again, once by the widening of the railway, and later the building of the Portway road, cutting the estate off from the river’s edge.
The most interesting view as far as we are concerned, is one from Kings Weston house looking out towards Penpole Point and Portishead beyond. This little sketch dates from 1857 and shows the woods and tree-scattered park stretching unbroken as far as the estuary. The foreground is dominated by two lime trees, around which a rustic seat is positioned to take best advantage of the view. These lime trees survive today next to the house at the western end of the coffee shop terrace, though the bench is now a distant memory.
Looking across the park from the shade of the lime trees outside Kings Weston house in 1857.
The area before final preparation and digging-over.
Since we started work on the View Garden area alongside Napier Miles Road a number of people have asked what we were going to plant there. Our initial ambition was only to get on top of the undergrowth that was threatening the wall, but ongoing work allowed us to think more ambitiously. Over the following months, one of our volunteers, Mike, has been diligently forking through the whole area getting rid of roots and breaking up the ground ahead of a planned seeding of the area as wildflower meadow. He was joined last month in a final push to get the ground prepared for sowing.
Because of the wet weather this year things had been delayed a little, but we had a good turnout of volunteers on Saturday 13th of May to dig over the whole area again and get rid of the last of the nettle and bramble roots that would have quickly undone any work on the new planting.
Volunteers dig-in with the task alongside Napier Miles Road.
By the end of the day we’d managed to dig and rake-over most of the area, but not quite all. Everything was finally polished off the following weekend and a specialist mix of wildflower meadow, and hedge mix for the shadier areas, was sown. The weather since proved providential, and the seeds were quickly watered in by the rain, with seeds already starting to germinate just a week later!
Thank you to all our volunteers on this, and thanks to Avonmouth & Lawrence Weston Wind Turbine Fund for grant funding the seed. We’ll try and keep you update with the results of this project as it develops.
The tilled ground a few weeks later. Look closely and you can see the green shoots coming up.
Finally!! A major milestone in the iron bridge restoration was reached at the end of last month, with the return of the historic structure, albeit 1.1 metres higher. Contractors started work early in the morning of the 30th May, bringing in a crane, the bridge strapped to a flat-loader, and closing the footpaths nearby for safety. A group of campaigners and visitors gathered at the west abutment to watch proceedings.
With spectators beyond, contractors watch as the first half of the freshly restored and painted bridge is craned back into place.
The east half of the bridge returns to meet its partner half way.
The bridge looks resplendent in its new livery of dark green paint, a colour picked to match the original colouring found beneath old paint layers. Contractors from Dorothea Restoration and Griffiths were on hand to make sure that the components would fit back together in their new position; not an easy task with the bearing stones having to be raised and reset at their new level.
The first section, the west end, was gradually lowered into place, and proved the more troublesome of the parts. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing and cutting of the stonework it was eventually seated in position. The east end then followed, then the central plate that fastened the two ends of the bridge together. After some careful adjustment the whole structure was back in place and true.
Work will carry on now, touching up the new paintwork, erecting the steps either end, and fitting the handrails and railings to them. The road closure has been extended until the 15th to allow some of this work to be done, and the final completion is supposed to be the first week in July. Everyone is looking forward to being able to celebrate the reopening!
T he two halves back in place, awaiting the central joining connection.
