Victorian
Among the many transformations that reshaped the Kentish countryside during the Victorian era, few can have been as striking as the remaking of Hall Place, the great house that stands beside the village of Leigh, near Tonbridge. Thanks to two contemporary accounts — one published in the magazine The Garden on 9 June 1877, the other appearing in Country Life Illustrated on 15 December 1900 under the title 'Country Homes and Gardens Old and New: Hall Place, Leigh Kent' — we have a unusually vivid record of what was achieved there, and of the man who directed it.
In 1870 the old mansion was taken down and rebuilt on a fresh site within the park. The owner who commissioned this ambitious work was Samuel Morley, Esquire, Member of Parliament, a man whose wealth was such that he was described as the richest commoner in England. Morley did not stop at the house itself. He engaged the architect George Devey to work on Hall Place, and to lay out the grounds he turned to one of the foremost horticultural figures of the age, the landscape gardener Robert Marnock.
Marnock deserves more than a passing mention, for his story is remarkable in its own right. His career in gardens stretched across fifty years, and it began in the 1820s at Bretton Hall near Wakefield, where he served as a notably young head gardener. From those early beginnings he went on to a series of prestigious commissions: he landscaped Dunorlan Park in Tunbridge Wells, worked on parts of Kew Gardens, contributed to the grounds of Warwick Castle, and was involved at Gravetye Manor. As late as 1889 he was still designing gardens, at Rousden in Devon, and he lived on beyond that date. In the early 1870s, the very period of his work for Morley, he was living in Regent's Park in London, where he also lent his skills to helping re-landscape that famous royal park. He was a writer as well as a practitioner: his book English Garden Flowers remains in print to this day, a testament to his lasting influence.
What, then, did Marnock bring to Hall Place? His signature style has been described as 'Gardenesque', and its hallmarks were rolling, informal layouts of ground, groups of mature trees, and generous plantings of ornamental shrubbery. Rather than imposing rigid formality, he shaped the land so that the plantings appeared to flow naturally across it — an approach perfectly suited to the wooded valley landscape of the Medway valley country around Leigh.
The rebuilding of the house gave Marnock and Morley an opportunity to rethink the whole setting, yet they were careful not to discard what already existed. The original pleasure grounds and the kitchen gardens were kept, and indeed enlarged, so that the old and the new worked together. Even the demolition of the previous mansion was put to use. The surplus material from the old foundations was shaped into a planted mound, and this served a practical as well as a decorative purpose: it hid the walls of the kitchen garden from view of the house, so that the working heart of the estate did not intrude on the ornamental views.
The mound also carried a piece of Victorian engineering that the 1877 account clearly found impressive. Atop it stood a brick tank with a capacity of more than 1,000 gallons, positioned roughly 30 feet above the average level of the surrounding ground. Keeping a tank at that height supplied with water was no small feat. The water came from a well situated in the valley below, and to move it uphill the estate relied on a turbine wheel driven by a stream, which forced the water upwards through pipes running a total length of about half a mile. It was a self-contained system of the kind that Victorian estate owners delighted in, combining utility with a certain quiet ingenuity.
Water in the landscape was central to the design in another way. The lake at Hall Place, which covers around 13 acres, was created when the new mansion was built. It fills a natural valley within the deer park, so that although it is entirely a product of that building campaign, it sits in the land as though nature had placed it there. Around its margins and through the grounds, the woodland was made up chiefly of oak, elm, beech and lime — the familiar trees of the Kentish countryside, arranged in the informal masses that Marnock favoured.
Perhaps the most astonishing horticultural detail from this period concerns the large horse chestnut trees, which were transplanted in full leaf. Moving mature trees at all was a considerable undertaking in the nineteenth century; doing so while they were in leaf, rather than during winter dormancy, speaks both of the confidence of the garden staff and of the resources that Morley could command. Another recorded curiosity is a specimen of Pinus insignis that had already reached a height of 40 feet, evidence of the taste for striking conifers that Victorian gardeners shared.
It is worth remembering how labour-intensive such a garden was. The team of gardeners working at Hall Place in the years from the 1870s through to the 1920s was far larger than the establishment of today, when Tim Bance holds the post of gardener at Hall Place. Every mown slope, every transplanted chestnut, every shrub in the ornamental beds represented the work of many hands.
An article drawing on the Parish Magazine of April 2015 and the local history archive reminds us how much of this Victorian vision can still be traced. The rebuilt house, the lake in its valley, the planted mound and the mature woodland together preserve the character that Marnock and Morley gave Hall Place more than a century and a half ago — a private landscape of national quality, created at the height of the Victorian age.