The Garden House With Attached Boundary Walls

The Garden House with attached boundary walls is a mid-18th century garden room, altered subsequently. It may have been designed by Richard Jones, although this is subject to some uncertainty. The building is constructed of limestone ashlar with a slate roof. It was built across a boundary wall retaining the south side of the churchyard of St Thomas’s Church.

The building is two storeys high. The main facade faces south, into the gardens, and at the upper level features a twelve-pane sash window above a sill band, flanked by Ionic columns with a pulvinated frieze, cornice, and a high blocking course. Below this is a triple arched arcade containing two-light casements with arched lights, set above ashlar breast walls with moulded architraves, keystones and imposts. The arcade is supported by four unfluted Doric columns, complete with a broken entablature, and returns in the first bay on each end with paired Doric columns. The left return has a former eighteen-pane sash window, modified on the lower sash, at first floor, with a blocked opening to the right. The right return is plain at the upper level, and an 18th-century door is set into the retaining wall to the right. There is a small central stack on the roof, and another to the rear. Parts of the rear of the building are visible within the churchyard. The east side has a plain facade with a full entablature including a pulvinated frieze. Attached at the north-east corner is a cylindrical unit with a stone slate conical roof on a rubble base, featuring a grilled opening and a blind oculus to the base. The rear wall, which continues to the right, has a lofty central stack in coursed rubble with ashlar trim, showing one offset.

On the ground floor, the former loggia has three fine ashlar arched niches to the rear wall, with stone fielded panelling between and to returns.

Attached to either side to the pavilion's high retaining walls, which are constructed in coursed stone with coping, are sloping walls that form the boundary between the church and the garden, steeply sloping to the left and rising to the right, following the garden's slope.

Historically, a drawing by Thomas Robins of Widcombe Manor shows the building straddling the graveyard wall and forming part of the Widcombe Manor gardens, possibly used as a banqueting house. Richard Jones’ notebooks reference drawings done for Squire Bennet and his summer house within his garden.