Gate Piers, Gates, Walls And Railings South Of Park Lodge

Gate Piers, Gates, Walls and Railings South of Park Lodge

The former south entrance to Bletchley Park dates to around 1886 and comprises a concave entrance arrangement of red brick walls topped with modern railings and four sandstone piers with iron gates. The walls are constructed in header bond with visible fixing points for the original railings embedded in the sandstone coping stones. The replacement twentieth-century railings to the walls are not of special architectural interest. Both sets of piers are polygonal and complementary in design, though the outer pair is less elaborate than the inner pair, which support the gates. All piers are chamfered with decorative heads to each face and moulded capstones. The inner piers are particularly ornate, creating a blind arcade effect with very shallow buttresses, niches, and decorative heads. The gate piers retain parts of the metal stands for globe lanterns (now lost but visible in early twentieth-century photographs). The iron gates themselves are original, featuring decorative scrollwork to the panels.

Bletchley Park is a large country house built in 1860 and significantly extended in 1883 for its owner Herbert Samuel Leon, an MP for Bletchley between 1891 and 1895 and a newspaper owner and financier. Park Lodge was built in 1886 as the south gate lodge, forming part of considerable investment and enhancement of the estate during the 1880s. The 1881 Ordnance Survey map shows a recessed, concave entrance to the park, but by the time of the 1900 mapping the entrance appears to have been enlarged and the lodge constructed. It therefore seems likely that the south entrance to the park was remodelled in the mid-1880s, with the new gate piers and lodge erected as contemporary works to create a more impressive entrance to the estate. Although no longer functioning as an entrance gate, these structures have group value with Bletchley Park and form a historic group with the contemporary Park Lodge immediately to the north.