The West Walled Garden Bartlow Park Including Teak Glass House, Potting Shed, Boiler Room, Tunnel And Bunker

The West Walled Garden at Bartlow Park

This listed structure comprises a walled kitchen garden enclosure with several associated buildings and features. The most significant element is a glass house designed by Wrinch & Sons, measuring 24.5 metres in length by 5.1 metres at each end, with a rectangular plan and hip-roofed teak construction. The frame is made of teak and iron, set on a brick plinth. The central section projects as a gabled show house containing open tanks of heated water with iron gratings beneath the floor—a design indicating it served as a tropical exotic house, likely for orchids. The structure retains excellent original cast iron components including vents, locks, winding gears, brackets, gratings, purlins, truss rods and gutters, together with most of the original glass glazing with minimal loss.

Two extensions project to the rear. The first is a brick-built potting shed and office with a fireplace, two windows, tiled roof and a chimney with ornamental projecting brickwork matching the gardener's bungalow to the north-west. The second extension is glazed and north-facing, suited to heat-loving orchids avoiding direct sun. A gravelled terrace fronts the plant house.

Beneath the potting shed lies a brick boiler room accessed by steps from the rear path. It is lit by a lunette window in the east wall and contains a semi-circular recess in the south wall that originally accommodated part of the boiler and flues. The boiler itself has been removed though some mountings survive.

The most remarkable feature is a brick-lined tunnel running approximately 45 metres along the north side of the boiler house to its west end, where it terminates at a coal bunker. The tunnel is high enough for a man to stand upright and retains the remains of a truck with a single rail track running its length. The coal bunker is surrounded by a high brick wall with semi-circular coping bricks and piers, built in matching style to the garden walls. It is entered via a pair of full-height wooden doors at the western end.

The broader walled enclosure measures 3 to 3.5 metres in height, constructed in pinkish-grey brick with flat stone copings and supported at regular intervals by piers. The eastern dividing wall is older with a flint base. The walls incorporate arched doorways fitted with wrought iron gates and fans with stone-set hinges and latches.

Historical Context

The site formed the kitchen garden of Bartlow House, a 19th-century mansion destroyed by fire in 1947. The First Edition Ordnance Survey map of 1877 shows a large free-standing glass house with shed and boiler house behind, located south-west of the original house's park. The estate was purchased in 1899 by Reverend Charles Henry Brocklebank (1864–1935), fourth son of the 1st Baronet Brocklebank, a prominent Liverpool shipping family with interests in Cunard, the Suez Canal, railways, insurance and banking. Brocklebank was an enterprising and experimental agriculturalist managing over 1,000 acres with pedigree herds. Upon acquiring the estate, he improved the house, created model kennels, cottages and farm buildings, and expanded the kitchen garden. He was a contemporary of architect A.C. Blomfield, and his father Sir Arthur William Blomfield is known to have advised Brocklebank on earlier matters, though their involvement with the Bartlow garden design is unconfirmed.

The 1903 Ordnance Survey map shows a second glass house west of the first with an extension and small shed. The gardens were enlarged in 1905 with land purchase to the west, establishing the present fully walled garden in its current form. To this 1905 phase belong the main garden walls, the teak house, the tunnel, boiler and the head gardener's bungalow. The peach house and pool in the eastern enclosure, though not recorded on maps until 1978, are stylistically of this period.

The estate was sold in 1935 to Lord de Ramsay, who did not reside there. During the Second World War, the mansion was requisitioned by the army and a bomb damaged the north wall of the garden, destroying one of two-span glass houses in the eastern enclosure. The original mansion burnt down in 1947. In 1962 the estate passed to the current owners and a new house, Bartlow Park, was built to the east of the original site. In 2002, the garden section was sold separately from Bartlow Park itself.

The western walled enclosure survives as a discrete entity with most original features intact, including the distinctive teak house and the remarkable 45-metre coal tunnel—possibly unique for a garden of this size.