Monthly Archives: September 2024

Another Successful heritage open day

the dining room  with crowds enjoying the day. (Photo, Bob Pitchford) 

This year’s September open day must rank amongst one of the best in recent years. With fine weather and a sense of occasion the day attracted just shy of 600 visitors between opening at 10am and half-four. Five busy tours were hosted by KWAG throughout the day taking visitors through each of the state rooms on the ground floor including the former Drawing Room where our usual exhibition was held. Noticeably, the sun encouraged may people to explore more of the estate, with a constant stream of people seen walking up the path to The Echo and back.

This year the exhibition was augmented by a new display cabinet where we were able to show some of the smaller artefacts we’ve not previously been able to. As with the last couple of years, we were selling the KWAG Christmas cards to help support our work around the estate. Perhaps because of the fine weather or new postal costs these weren’t as popular as previous occasions. However, the day attracted around £500 in cash and digital donations; this will help go towards offsetting the cost of the Big Bulb plant to be held this month.

The Drawing Room, now the Oak Room, hosts KWAG’s exhibition in the middle of a house tour. (Photo Bob Pitchford) 

As usual, huge thanks must go to KWAG volunteers who gifted their time staffing the event, greeting visitors, and manning the exhibition. Our thanks also go the team at Kings Weston house for hosting the event and allowing KWAG to play such a large part in showcasing it.

Inspired by Kings Weston

In many ways this piece follows on from last months article about the original interior of Vanbrugh’s Kings Weston house. It comes after we discovered another mansion, Gloster House, in Ireland, with some interesting similarities. The architectural history of England and Ireland are rarely studied together, yet national distinctions were less prominent during the Eighteenth Century when the two kingdoms fell under a single ruler.

The distinctive original appearance of the Saloon at Kings Weston reconstructed. Reconfigured, the room is now known as the hall or gallery. 

Gloster House, County Offaly, is a long low-lying mansion built from around 1700 onwards. The two later wings rather upset the balance of the original nine-bay façade in the middle, an exterior that perhaps looks a little earlier than what lies within. Entering through the front door there is a spectacular double-height space and immediately in front of the visitor are two tiers of arches, the upper being an open gallery like that which once existed at Kings Weston.  The main hall gives onto an inner hall from which a pair of staircases take you up to the gallery level from where views back into the hall can be enjoyed. Alcoves line the side walls in a similar way as drawings suggest was the case at Kings Weston. There are some key differences of course, there are no fireplaces in this space, and the overall impression is more decorative and ornamental than similar spaces designed by Vanbrugh.

Ground floor plan of Gloster House, County Offaly. Later extensions shown in light grey and double-height space in paler blue. 

These works at Gloster House, dating probably to the 1720s, have been attributed to perhaps Ireland’s most important architect, Edward Lovett Pearce. He’s a figure we’ve brought into Kings Weston’s story before. Born into an Irish family, Edward was a cousin of Sir John Vanbrugh and, at 16 years old, was apprenticed to him after the death of his own father in 1715. This was a period during which Vanbrugh’s office was still overseeing works at Kings Weston. Whilst other works would have become familiar to the young pupil, it appears as though Kings Weston’s interior made an impact.

The entrance hall at Gloster House, County Offaly. (Gloster House website)
The gallery, with arches on the left overlooking the hall. (Gloster House website) 

After a brief time in the army in 1717 Lovett Pearce returned to architecture and to his homeland. It is during this early period that the Gloster House work is supposed to have been completed. The similarity between the lost Saloon at Kings Weston what Pearce later achieved in Ireland is most marked. Pearce increasingly moved away from Vanbrugh’s Baroque style to the developing Palladian movement, but at Gloster House he combines Vanbrugh’s dramatic and playful use of space with more modern ornamentation. The tight cage of stone arcades constricting the staircase that was built at kings Weston is transformed in Gloster House into a light open gallery with a single freestanding colonnade and classical-inspired vault.  
 
Gloster House is not the only building that seems to owe Kings Weston its inspiration. Dated 1720, a design for stables survives in the Kings Weston Book of Drawings authored by a Mr Price. Although this is the only known reference to this gentleman it shows he was a competent architect. Though the context in which the drawing was created are not known, Mr Price is likely to have been familiar enough with Kings Weston to be able to supply designs complementary enough to Vanbrugh’s house. It’s likely that Price was “John Price of Richmond” (sometimes “of Wandsworth”). Price has the strongest claim to be architect of Barnsley Park, Gloucestershire, where works were ongoing in 1720.

The entrance front of Barnsley Park, Gloucestershire. 

Just a glance at the entrance front of Barnsley Park and one can see similarities. The composition of the temple frontage, bold keystones, arched windows, weighty attic storey and pediment all feel familiar. The other elevations are all entirely different, a feature shared with Kings Weston, but entirely individual in character. We have to go within to see how exposure to the unique Saloon of Kings Weston might have translated into Price’s work. The entrance hall repeats Kings Weston’s double-height space and uses an open arcaded back wall to introduce a dramatic visual connection between it and the inner hall and gallery beyond. Unlike Kings Weston or Gloster House, the inner hall isn’t a showcase for a grand stair, this is set off to one side. Another oddity is that the first floor gallery doesn’t take advantage of the open arcades for a grandstand view, instead allowing the arches to stand as little more than a room divider. Instead, the gallery bridges the inner hall along its back wall.
 
The ceilings to the two halls at Barnsley Park are the reverse of the arrangement at Kings Weston; the heavily coved front Hall is like the one formerly in the stair hall at Kings Weston, and the flat ceiling with a central oval compartment more like the surviving Saloon ceiling. Could the coved ceiling existing at Barnsley Park show us what might have been lost to the Victorian refurbishment of the stair hall?    

The hall at Barnsley Park, Gloucestershire, with its own version of the arcaded end wall. 

Like Gloster House, much of the effect at Barnsley Park arises from thickly applied decorative embellishments rather than simple architectural form, and, in that, they likely differ from Vanbrugh’s intentions at Kings Weston. This was a building Vanbrugh referred to as a “chateau” and clearly hoped it would assert a masculine, martial, presence on landscape and occupants alike. This perhaps proved to be the undoing of the Saloon and stair hall. No longer in line with the developing direction in architecture, lacking in domestic comforts, and otherwise inhospitable, it’s unsurprising that they were remodelled by later generations. However, these two surviving interiors, one by Pearce and the other by Price, might allow us a glimpse of what was lost.  

Ground floor plan of Barnsley Park, the paler blue denoting the double-height spaces.


The History of Kings Weston’s grandest room. 

Ahead of Heritage Open Days, and to accompany our history of the stair hall last year, here’s a short history of the mighty room variously known as the Picture Gallery or Hall, but perhaps more properly called the Saloon. It’s always been intended as the most impressive of the rooms in the house, where important guests could enter and find themselves in a space designed to impose itself on the visitor through its great scale. Despite many changes in appearance from the original design by Sir John Vanbrugh, even today the hall has that power.

An original plan for Kings Weston house with annotations. 

Today, what we see on entering by way of the front door is a comprehensive redecoration of the 1760s. As designed in 1712 for owner Edward Southwell, the walls were bare Penpole stone, with arches, alcoves, arcades, and other classical architectural detailing echoing that of the main facade. Visitors entering through the front door would have been greeted with two fireplaces before them, an expression of both hospitality and, in being able to afford fuel to keep both burning, wealth. Between them was a single arched door leading into the stair hall beyond, attention to which would have been drawn through glimpsed views through open arcades and a gallery at first floor level. Around the rest of the room were arched doorways and semi-circular alcoves, perhaps for the display of statues.

A Computer generated view of the Saloon at Kings Weston as originally designed in 1712. 

A dramatic interplay of spaces was a familiar feature in Vanbrugh’s repertoire. The Hall at Blenheim Palace is the most ambitious of these theatrical spaces, but similar arrangements at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire (design circa 1715), and Seaton Deleval, Northumberland (1718) repeated themes developed at Kings Weston. Even in its fire-damaged state, the entrance hall at Seaton Deleval gives the strongest idea of how Kings Weston’s Saloon might have looked when it was first occupied in 1716. The open arcades and high level galleries allow the visitor to experience the spaces from a variety of angles, passing from grand volumes into more intimate passages, from light airy spaces to dark and back again. Vanbrugh intentionally excited visitors by sculpting these contrasting and multi-layered spaces. He was ahead of his time in creating an experiential architecture, designed to provoke an emotional response from just air and stone.

The hall at Seaton Deleval with similar features to Kings Weston. (Jon Dalrymple)


Although architecturally impressive and grand in scale, the Saloon can hardly have been a practical or comfortable room to use. The stone walls would have been cold, and the open arcades would have promoted drafts to draw through the house.  In 1769, by the time the Saloon was described in “A six week tour thru the southern counties of England and Wales” as “the only tolerable room, and that rendered totally useless, by a vast echo” its shortcomings had been addressed with new designs.

Cut-away of Sir John Vanbrugh’s original design for the Saloon and Stair Hall. 

Edward Southwell’s Grandson, the third Edward Southwell, returned from his Grand Tour of Europe in 1762, a 24-year old with grand plans for his inheritance. Employing the architect Robert Mylne who, it is thought, he met in Rome, he set about modernising Kings Weston. Mylne was engaged in April the following year, but it wasn’t until four years into the project that work on the Saloon began. In November 1767 Mylne started sending Southwell a series of drawings for the room. General elevations of the walls, cornice details, fireplace, and “frames of the pictures at large”. Unlike a tradditional gallery the paintings were all integrated into their architectural setting rather than hanging in tradditional gilt frames; It’s this that ensured their survival in the house to today.  

the Saloon with its decorative plasterwork framing the Southwell family portraits.

The carved stone architectural details were chiselled away and the room lined with timber studs and lath and plaster to improve both sound and warmth. The work in the Saloon was intended not just to improve its performance, but to display the large collection of family portraits as the lineage of a great family. The intention was to use each of the three blank walls to display the portraits of a particularly auspicious branch of the family. The Southwell’s themselves took the north wall, Edward’s mother’s side, the Watsons, took the wall opposite, but the wall confronting the arriving visitor was reserved for the most notable family: the Cromwells.
 
The ceiling appears to have been retained, only slightly altered from the original but receiving extravagant swags of flowers in plasterwork, all wrought by the famous Bristol workshop of Thomas Stocking. Mylne’s “drawing for a flower and urn in ceiling of saloon” apparently didn’t find favour. The redesigned Saloon was finished in 1768, with Mylne’s last correspondence on it being “patterns of water straw colours for the saloon”, presumably a yellow/stone colour paint for the walls.

Detail of the ornate plasterwork flowers and rose executed by Thomas Stocking in 1767-8

Research updates

Kings Weston has been something of a focus for academic research just recently. A team from Trinity College Dublin recently visited Bristol with a research project looking at stone in historic buildings. Whilst their main area of interest was the Exchange in the city centre, they also visited Kings Weston as part of their enquiries. We were able to help in directing them to various written sources that pinpointed where the masonry for the house was being obtained from, either the park itself or further afield. They were also helpful in providing information on the sourcing of various stones from Ireland that were used ornamentally in the building.
 
The National Trust have also been in contact and found our research into the rooftop chimney arcades helpful in understanding how the rooftop areas of Seaton Delaval Hall were designed and used. This Northumberland mansion was also the product of architect Sir John Vanbrugh’s imagination, and the Trust are keen to find ways for visitors to best appreciate them. Our help included providing evidence that the arcade at Kings Weston was designed as a viewing platform, and directing them to Vanbrugh’s original letters in which he “would fain to have that part rightly hit off” and answer to what he hoped to achieve architecturally.  

The chimneys of Kings Weston house appearing above the landscape in 1789.  

Another exciting development has been the announcement that the Sir John Soane museum in London will be holding an exhibition on Vanbrugh in February 2026 to coincide with the tercentenary of his death. Author and curator Charles Saumarez Smith visited the estate last year and is engaged in researching Vanbrugh and his involvement in the rebuilding with the hope to publish a new biography to coincide with this commemorative year. We were glad to been able to accompany him on his visit and share a lot of our research to support this endeavour. Some time to wait yet, but this is definitely something to look forward to!