The Landscape Style garden (of which ‘Capability’ Brown is the best known designer), has been described as the greatest British contribution to European Art. Arguably this is true but, in this, it must surely sit alongside the Landscape Movement in painting. Both of these are embodied at Leaden Hall.
Most Landscape Style gardens and parklands cover hundreds of acres, but the fashion filtered down the social scale from the aristocracy to the professional and middle classes. However, very few of these more modest, smaller-scale gardens survive. Still less in town settings, where the pressures of development are high. The garden at Leaden Hall is a gem in miniature. A landscape garden of less than 3 acres. And it comes complete with its original, walled kitchen garden – possibly a unique survival of its type in a town setting. Both parts of the garden were laid out at the same time as the house was being done up in 1799 – making the whole ensemble a set piece. Therefore Leaden Hall is a very rare example of intact middle-class house and garden of the later Georgian period.
But the importance of Leaden Hall does not end there. We know so much about what the garden looked like, as it started to reach maturity twenty odd years after it was laid out, thanks to one of the titans of the Landscape Movement in painting – John Constable. The artist knew Leaden Hall and its garden intimately. It was the home of his closest friend, Archdeacon John Fisher. He visited numerous times, including two prolonged stays of many weeks in 1820 and 1829. During these stays he was frequently inspired to paint and sketch. One can imagine him, glancing out of the window, seeing the scudding clouds over the water meadows and dashing outside with his paints. As a result of him setting up his easel in the garden and on the river bank opposite, we have sixteen images by the great artist, which show various elements of the design of the garden: vistas, shrubberies, flower beds, the vegetable beds of the kitchen garden, individual trees. (Excitingly, there may be a seventeenth image. It certainly shows Leaden Hall and is currently awaiting expert assessment to confirm attribution). With two more images by Fisher himself and one by Constable’s assistant, John Dunthorne, there are 20 historic images of this garden. For a modest-scale garden, in an age before photography, this is unprecedented. The fact that most of the images were made by one of the greatest British artists who ever lived, adds hugely to their significance and that of the garden.
It has been argued that Constable’s scenes do not survive. This is untrue. The focal points of the three vistas he painted from the garden all remain. The borrowed landscape of the water meadows is intact. The trees in the garden survive – some of them formally shrubs, but still there, nonetheless. The Great Alder, which so impressed Constable that he sketched it repeatedly, does not have the same shape and stature, but remains nonetheless. He included it prominently in one of his most important sketches – the only work by the artist in the National Gallery that is not a fully finished painting. The walled kitchen garden, separated from the flower garden by an unusual feature of an open railing, giving light and views, also survives. One just has to make a little effort to properly understand what the images show us, to see that the vast majority of what the great artist painted is still here. A remarkable thing after 200 years. Something that cannot be said of the vast majority of places that Constable loved and painted.
Undeniably the garden of Leaden Hall is not pristine. There was some unfortunate development during Leaden Hall’s time as a school – though they were generally sympathetic guardians of the site. There’s a tennis court, a small swimming pool and classrooms. But these were always intended to be temporary structures. Of the historic landscaping, 80 per cent of the trees on the site and most of the shrubs are part of the historic layout. All the modern interventions are removable and reversible – in a way that an archive building, constructed of solid stone and rising high above the walls of the garden, almost to the height of the roof of Leaden Hall, will not be. This proposed archive building will sever the kitchen garden in half, rendering it meaningless. Furthermore, Constable’s precious little view of this part of the garden, an intimate painting with very few parallels in his large body of work, will be lost forever.
The future of Leaden Hall hangs in the balance. The proposals presented in the current scheme do nothing to enhance the garden or restore its structure, the central vista from the house across the river and the water meadows will remain compromised and the kitchen garden will effectively destroyed. If we lose the garden of Leaden Hall, we lose forever a rare, small-scale landscape garden – and the chance to tread in Constable’s footsteps, to effectively walk in his paintings.