Garden Walls, Formerly Associated With Bowden Green

PANGBOURNE

278/0/10013 PANGBOURNE ROAD 05-SEP-06 Bowden Green Garden walls, formerly associated with Bowden Green

GV II Former kitchen garden walls for Bowden Green House (now the Junior School of Pangbourne College, listed Grade II*), 1897 by Arnold Mitchell. It is built in red brick in an English bond with stone copings and tile decoration

DESCRIPTION: The garden walls form the west, south and east boundaries around a former rectangular garden. The south wall is a modest low brick wall with coping stones and occasional square piers. However, the west and east walls are decorative and impressive at over two metres high. They each have stepped angle buttresses at their southern ends and round-arched gateways. The east gate has flanking stepped buttresses and a stepped coping, with an oculus above the gate arch with a narrow tile surround. The gateway is now sealed with a modern wooden plank gate with an arched top. The east elevation of the wall is also stepped with two angled brick bands running horizontally along the wall face, but its west elevation is plain and flat. The west gate is similar to the east with flanking stepped buttresses, although without the stepped parapet and oculus. The west wall is also stepped on the external (west) face and has a flat internal (east) elevation. The coping of both side walls is identical; being formed of a band of horizontal tiles surmounted by header bricks. There are a number of adjoining buildings which abut and in part incorporate sections of the garden walls. However, only the garden walls themselves are of special interest.

HISTORY: The garden walls were built in 1897 to the design of Arnold Mitchell as part of a complex of ancillary service buildings (which also included a coachman's cottage, stables, pump/engine house and fowl house) to Bowden Green House. SUMMARY OF IMPORTANCE: The former kitchen garden walls of 1897 are by Arnold Mitchell, a well-known Edwardian architect, who designed a number of buildings that are now listed. The walls are of special interest as relatively intact, elegant and high quality garden structures of the late C19. They are a physical expression of the infrastructure required to supply large country houses in the late C19 and have group value with the adjacent and contemporary fowl house and with the Junior School, which they were designed to serve.

SOURCES: 'A Modern English Country House' in Studio magazine, 1898, pp245-247.