Buildings And Walls Of The Kitchen Garden At Shardeloes Park

Buildings and Walls of the Kitchen Garden at Shardeloes Park

These walled kitchen gardens at Shardeloes Park near Amersham date from 1787 to 1789, though they may incorporate elements of an earlier water garden from the mid-1720s. The architect is not known.

The gardens comprise five rectangular compartments extending roughly east to west for a total length of 280 metres and a depth of approximately 35 metres, with the central compartment slightly deeper. They slope gently downhill to the south and are bounded on the north by an 18th-century brick wall standing 3 metres tall, topped with red ceramic coping stones. This wall runs alongside and slightly set back from the A413 road (formerly the Aylesbury-Amersham turnpike). The wall is breached by a double entrance alongside the gardener's cottage and by an original 18th-century doorway towards its west end. The brick end walls on the east and west sides run downhill and reach up to 6 metres in height. Along the south side of the compartments extends an 18-metre-wide slip garden, bounded to the south by a brick and flint wall approximately 1 metre high. A ruinous cart entrance stands at the west end of this wall.

Against the main north wall in the central compartment sits a fairly plain gardener's cottage of the mid to late 19th century. Originally constructed as a three-bay structure, it was extended to five bays during the same period. The cottage is built in brick, stands two storeys tall, and is topped with a gabled tile roof, with the east gable wall hung in tile. Wooden sash windows overlook the garden. Abutting its west side is a contemporary single-storeyed brick shelter with a slate roof, featuring four arched entrances with blue brick detailing.

Ruinous slate-roofed brick sheds, heavily overgrown and difficult to inspect, stand along the north side of the south wall of the main compartment. Ranges of glasshouses shown on late 19th and early 20th-century Ordnance Survey maps have been cleared away. Further ruinous glasshouses, possibly dating to the late 19th century, stand against the south side of the south wall of the main compartment.

The walled kitchen garden forms part of the parkland landscape surrounding Shardeloes House, a mid-18th-century country house standing 250 metres to the south-east. This house was successively designed by architects Stiff Leadbetter, Robert Adam, and James and Samuel Wyatt (it is listed grade I). The parkland was created in the 1760s by Nathaniel Richmond, who naturalised an older formal landscape by Charles Bridgeman associated with an earlier house. Further work was undertaken by Humphry Repton, who produced a Red Book for the estate in 1794. Following the Second World War, the estate was subdivided and the house converted into flats.

Estate accounts held in Buckinghamshire Record Office record that the walled garden was built between 1787 and 1789. The removal of the kitchen gardens from the immediate vicinity of the house formed part of ongoing improvements to Shardeloes. The site had previously formed part of water gardens shown in a view dating from around 1730, these gardens probably being among works undertaken by Charles Bridgeman at Shardeloes in the mid-1720s. The kitchen gardens sit behind a tall wall that screens them from the turnpike, likely retained from the earlier water gardens; estate accounts record £101 spent on repairing old walls near the road. Comparison of a view of the water garden from around 1730 and later maps suggests that the kitchen garden's footprint directly overlies the boundaries of the northern part of the water gardens. The five compartments were newly built, and the estate accounts record substantial expenditure on walls and coping, three stove houses, and a hot house. Undated and unsigned drawings survive showing designs for a 135-foot-long green house with an elaborate octagonal central masonry pavilion-like structure, and for a hot house.

The late 19th-century first edition Ordnance Survey shows that at that date every structure associated with the gardens was concentrated tightly into the central compartment, an arrangement that was somewhat unusual. The four compartments to either side and the slip along the south side remained empty and were presumably devoted entirely to horticulture. On the opposite side of the Aylesbury-Amersham road, with boundaries respecting those of the walled kitchen garden, stood an orchard. Some form of structure occupied the south end of this, positioned over the road from the gardener's cottage, perhaps another gardener's house, and was presumably demolished when the road was converted to a dual carriageway.