Belmont House | |
---|---|
General information | |
Type | House |
Town or city | Throwley, near Faversham |
Country | United Kingdom |
Estimated completion | Between 1769 and 1793 |
Client | Edward Wilks, store-keeper at the nearby Faversham Powder Mill |
Owner | Harris family |
Grounds | 14 acres |
Design and construction | |
Architect(s) | Samuel Wyatt |
Website | |
belmont-house |
Belmont is a Georgian house and gardens in Throwley, near Faversham in east Kent. Built between 1769 and 1793, it has been described as "a marvellous example of Georgian architecture that has remained completely unspoilt". [1] The house is famous for the most extensive private collection of clocks in England. [1] The house, garden and clock collection were all featured in March 2023 in an episode of the BBC TV programme Antiques Roadshow which was filmed in 2022. [2]
There was no house or estate on the site until the land was bought in 1769 by Edward Wilks, store-keeper of the Royal Powder Mills at Faversham. [1] It was designed by the architect Samuel Wyatt. [3] The original house still stands as a wing of the present building. [1] The current house was largely created between 1789–1793 by Colonel John Montresor of the Royal Engineers. His career was cut short when he was accused of embezzlement and the house was bought at auction in 1801 by General George Harris, 1st Baron Harris, [1] for £9,000. [3] His descendants continued to live at Belmont, the clock collection being assembled by the 5th Lord Harris, who served as the first President of the Antiquarian Horological Society, [1] for which Jonathan Betts acts as Curatorial Adviser. [4] The house is now held by a trust established by Lord Harris. [3]
They cover up to 14 acres. [3] In the grounds are a walled garden, pinetum, Victorian shell grotto and an orangery planted with orange trees, palms and other tropical trees. [1] In 2001, the kitchen garden was restored according to a design by Arabella Lennox-Boyd. [3] The Walnut Walk, passes a line of pets' graves leads to the 'Prospect Tower', it was originally used as a summerhouse, and then later used as a pavilion by George Harris, 4th Baron Harris. [3]
The tower can be rented via the Landmark Trust. [5]
William Kent was an English architect, landscape architect, painter and furniture designer of the early 18th century. He began his career as a painter, and became Principal Painter in Ordinary or court painter, but his real talent was for design in various media.
Chiswick House is a Neo-Palladian style villa in the Chiswick district of London, England. A "glorious" example of Neo-Palladian architecture in west London, the house was designed and built by Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), and completed in 1729. The house and garden occupy 26.33 hectares. The garden was created mainly by the architect and landscape designer William Kent, and it is one of the earliest examples of the English landscape garden.
Sir William Chambers was a Swedish-Scottish architect, based in London. Among his best-known works are Somerset House, and the pagoda at Kew. Chambers was a founder member of the Royal Academy.
Cliveden is an English country house and estate in the care of the National Trust in Buckinghamshire, on the border with Berkshire. The Italianate mansion, also known as Cliveden House, crowns an outlying ridge of the Chiltern Hills close to the South Bucks villages of Burnham and Taplow. The main house sits 40 metres (130 ft) above the banks of the River Thames, and its grounds slope down to the river. There have been three houses on this site: the first, built in 1666, burned down in 1795 and the second house (1824) was also destroyed by fire, in 1849. The present Grade I listed house was built in 1851 by the architect Charles Barry for the 2nd Duke of Sutherland.
Buckingham Palace Garden is a large private park attached to the London residence of the monarch. It is situated to the rear (west) of Buckingham Palace, occupying a 17 hectares site in the City of Westminster and forms the largest private garden in the capital. It is bounded by Constitution Hill to the north, Hyde Park Corner to the west, Grosvenor Place to the south-west, and the Royal Mews, Queen's Gallery, and Buckingham Palace itself to the south and east.
Frogmore is an estate within the Home Park, adjoining Windsor Castle, in Berkshire, England. It comprises 33 acres (130,000 m2), of primarily private gardens managed by the Crown Estate. It is the location of Frogmore House, a royal retreat, and Frogmore Cottage. The name derives from the preponderance of frogs which have always lived in this low-lying and marshy area near the River Thames. This area is part of the local flood plain.
Waddesdon Manor is a country house in the village of Waddesdon, in Buckinghamshire, England. Owned by the National Trust and managed by the Rothschild Foundation, it is one of the National Trust's most visited properties, with over 463,000 visitors in 2019.
Faversham is a market town in Kent, England, 48 miles (77 km) from London and 10 miles (16 km) from Canterbury, next to the Swale, a strip of sea separating mainland Kent from the Isle of Sheppey in the Thames Estuary. It is close to the A2, which follows an ancient British trackway which was used by the Romans and the Anglo-Saxons, and known as Watling Street. The name is of Old English origin, meaning "the metal-worker's village".
Sissinghurst Castle Garden, at Sissinghurst in the Weald of Kent in England, was created by Vita Sackville-West, poet and writer, and her husband Harold Nicolson, author and diplomat. It is among the most famous gardens in England and is designated Grade I on Historic England's register of historic parks and gardens. It was bought by Sackville-West in 1930, and over the next thirty years, working with, and later succeeded by, a series of notable head gardeners, she and Nicolson transformed a farmstead of "squalor and slovenly disorder" into one of the world's most influential gardens. Following Sackville-West's death in 1962, the estate was donated to the National Trust. It is one of the Trust's most popular properties, with nearly 200,000 visitors in 2017.
Anglesey Abbey is a National Trust property in the village of Lode, 5+1⁄2 miles (8.9 km) northeast of Cambridge, England. The property includes a country house, built on the remains of a priory, 98 acres of gardens and landscaped grounds, and a working mill.
Scotney Castle is an English country house with formal gardens south-east of Lamberhurst in the valley of the River Bewl in Kent, England. It belongs to the National Trust.
George Harris, 1st Baron Harris GCB was a British soldier.
Sir Reginald Theodore Blomfield was a prolific British architect, garden designer and author of the Victorian and Edwardian period.
Beckenham was a local government district in north west Kent from 1878 to 1965 around the town of Beckenham. The area was suburban to London, formed part of the Metropolitan Police District and from 1933 was included in the area of the London Passenger Transport Board.
John Shaw Sr. (1776–1832) was an English architect. He was architect to Christ's Hospital in London, and to the Port of Ramsgate. Many of his works, including the church of St Dunstan-in-the-West in Fleet Street, London, were in a Gothic Revival style.
George Francis Robert Harris, 3rd Baron Harris, was a British peer, Liberal politician and colonial administrator. He served as the Governor of Trinidad from 1846 to 1854 and Governor of Madras from 1854 to 1859.
Coade stone or Lithodipyra or Lithodipra was stoneware that was often described as an artificial stone in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was used for moulding neoclassical statues, architectural decorations and garden ornaments of the highest quality that remain virtually weatherproof today.
Throwley is an English village south of Faversham in the Borough of Swale in Kent.The name is recorded in the Doomsday Book as Trevelai, which corresponds with a Brittonic origin, where "Trev" means a settlement or farm house and "Elai" typically relates to a fast moving river or stream.
Juniper Hall FSC Field Centre is an 18th-century country house, leased from the National Trust, on the east slopes of Mickleham in the deep Mole Gap of the North Downs in Surrey, England. The varying contours of the slopes provide habitats and environments for study including unimproved chalk grassland, coppiced woodlands, heathland and freshwater.
Strawberry Hill House—often called simply Strawberry Hill—is a Gothic Revival villa that was built in Twickenham, London, by Horace Walpole (1717–1797) from 1749 onward. It is a typical example of the "Strawberry Hill Gothic" style of architecture, and it prefigured the nineteenth-century Gothic Revival.