Blagdon Hall stands close to the former Great North Road, a few miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. At the end of the lake stands a circle of Doric columns known as The Temple. The columns were first erected as part of a rotunda ,with an unusual domed roof, at Heaton Hall, on the edge of Newcastle. Part of the grounds of Heaton Hall later became a public park, but when it looked as if the Temple was going to be a drain on corporation funds, it was removed to Blagdon in around 1937.

Matthew Ridley (1711-1778) of Heaton Hall was a successful businessman and represented Newcastle as mayor and as Member of Parliament. He succeeded his father to Heaton Hall in 1739, by which date the ‘beautiful house’ already stood amongst avenues, gardens and a wilderness. Ridley added a new stone front to the existing brick mansion, with towers at the corners and by 1766 Heaton Hall was noted by Sir Roger Newdigate as a ‘well looking house with round Towers at each End sashd & modern’ (confirming that the house was remodelled by Matthew Ridley, and not by his son Sir Matthew White Ridley in the 1770s as has previously been stated). An account in 1787 confirms that the architect of the new front was William Newton of Newcastle.

Ridley must also have been laying out his grounds in the then fashionable natural style: the park was described in 1769 as planted with ‘small clumps of young forest-trees’ (there is a tantalising mention of the landscape designer Richard Woods leaving Harewood in Yorkshire to visit ‘Mr Ridley’ in Northumberland in 1765). The watercolour below shows that there was a vista through a plantation to the Temple as a distant eye-catcher when approaching the estate.

The Temple probably also dates from this period of improvements. It is described as a ‘tempiato’ in Wallis’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland… of 1769, and in the 1770s William Beilby painted it for the Duchess of Northumberland’s album of views. It may also be the work of William Newton, although no evidence is known to survive.

Sadly no trace survives of some ‘mock ruins’ built by Ridley ‘as ornamental objects from Heaton Hall’. This folly, also extant by 1769, stood on an eminence at nearby Byker and as well as being an object from Heaton Hall, it gave a ‘most extensive prospect’ of the town of Newcastle and the shipping on the Tyne.

The Ridleys left Heaton in the middle of the nineteenth century, and the estate became home to the Potter family. In 1878 Addison Potter sold part of the pleasure grounds to the Corporation of Newcastle for use as a public park – this portion included the ‘ornamental temple-like building’, which was one of the first things to be seen when entering the new park via the South Gate. The Gardeners’ Chronicle magazine liked how the corporation had conserved the pleasure garden ‘very much as it was as a residential place’. Picture postcards show the Temple at the top of a slope, with steps rising through a rockery, although it is not clear if this was created by the Potter family or if it is a later landscaping by the Parks department.

In 1932 the Potters sold Heaton Hall, and the remainder of its ground, to a firm of builders. Under the headline ‘The End of Heaton Hall’ the local paper announced that the hall would be razed and the land developed for housing.

Meanwhile, the Temple in the park was not being kept in good repair and in December 1936 a corporation working group discussed its future. The councillors were divided, with some wishing to see its immediate demolition and others keen that it should be repaired. By that date Viscount Ridley of Blagdon (the viscountcy was created in 1900) had already been consulted, and had agreed to take the columns if the Temple was to be pulled down. The vote was won 4:3 in favour of keeping the Temple, but by autumn 1937 no action had been taken and it was roped off from the public and declared unsafe. Contractors were called in to give estimates for taking the structure down and re-erecting it at Blagdon – a deal must have been struck and the columns were moved the few miles to Blagdon. History does not seem to record what happened to the domed roof, but the columns form a charming eye-catcher at the head of the lake.

Blagdon Hall is a private home but the gardens open for charity on a few days each year. You can find forthcoming dates here.

Heaton Park, with adjoining parks along the valley of the Ouse Burn, is a Grade II registered public park and is freely accessible.

The Flâneuse is grateful to Dr Michael Cousins for sharing his transcript of the travel diary of Sir Roger Newdigate. Thanks also to Fiona Green for sharing her research into Heaton Park and to Richard Pears for information on Blagdon Hall.

Thank you for reading. As ever your thoughts or observations are very welcome. The comments box can be found at the foot of the page.

In 1761, Henry Blundell was given control of the Ince Blundell estate by his father. He had recently married Elizabeth Mostyn and the couple settled into the mansion house, which had been built earlier in the century. Blundell was an avid collector, with the funds to indulge his passion, and after his wife’s early death he spent time in Italy before returning to Ince Blundell to build two temples ‘purposely for the reception of statuary’.

Blundell (1724-1810) had become very wealthy thanks to family bequests and Ince Blundell was home to an impressive collection of Old Master and modern paintings. What was lacking was a fine collection of Roman statuary, so in 1776 he set off for Italy to join his friend, fellow collector and fellow Catholic, Charles Townley. With advice from Townley, and a network of contacts, he went on something of a shopping spree. Blundell returned to Italy in subsequent years, and also continued to buy works privately and at auction in Britain, quickly running out of space to display the works.

Blundell’s solution was to display sculpture in a complex of garden buildings fronted by a classical pedimented temple. This was connected to a greenhouse and an octagonal room, all of which were filled with sculpture as well as plants (the tithe map of 1843 shows this substantial range of buildings). The temple carries a Greek inscription, shown in the engraving above, which is usually translated as ‘here spring is eternal and it is summer in months not its own’ – i.e. the heated glasshouses allowed plants to flourish in all seasons (this inscription also appears on the orangery in Clapham).

The temple is attributed to the Liverpool architect William Everard (1723-1792) on the evidence that a portrait of the architect showed him with ‘the plan in his hand’, pointing to the completed structure (the portrait was shown at a lecture in Liverpool in 1869, but its current whereabouts are unknown). The temple was extant by February 1790 when it is shown in a drawing (see below). In that same year the Polish princess Isabel Czartoryska visited – she was not impressed by the combination of sculpture and verdure. She complained that Ince was a ‘storehouse of various objects gathered without taste or choice. Plenty of ugly statues and many sarcophagi, so called antique, positioned among the geraniums in the hot houses’.

Blundell soon needed still more space, and in 1801 he discussed the creation a new gallery with Townley. He commissioned a wooden model (sadly lost) of the planned ‘room’, which took the form of a rotunda modelled on the pantheon in Rome.

Like the original, the building was top-lit although, this being Lancashire, it was glazed. When complete it was used to house his ‘choicest specimens’ and one visitor recorded how his ‘eye roved in admiration from figure to figure’. Blundell had boasted that many of the buildings on his estate were to his own design, and he may have designed this building himself, using an executant architect/mason named briefly in the surviving accounts as Hope.

Blundell carefully catalogued his collection and in 1803 he published a handlist of the works in the house and both temples, followed in 1809 by a lavish two-volume illustrated work.

Originally the pantheon was freestanding, but in the second half of the nineteenth century it was connected to the house via a single storey link.

Whilst Blundell understandably favoured classical buildings in which to display the sculpture collection, there was a gothic ornament in his park. Sometime before 1786 a prospect tower was erected east of the house (it is shown on Yates’s map of the County Palatine of Lancaster published in that year). Described in 1823 as the ‘observatory’, it was said to ‘command a very extensive view’.

Named on nineteenth century Ordnance Survey maps as ‘Blundell Tower’, it disappeared early in the next century and is known only from two artworks. The drawing above, formerly at Stonor Park (once home to Blundell’s son-in-law), is a great record of the lost tower. National Museums Liverpool was able to purchase this view for the city’s collection at Christies in 1992. The tower also appears in a painting by Charles Towne of Blundell’s horse, Duchess (private collection).

James Lees-Milne, Historic Buildings Secretary of the National Trust, visited Ince, a ‘romantic Papist establishment’ in August 1947. By that date the house had descended to the Weld family, who had added the name Blundell.  Lees-Milne found the Pantheon ‘marvellous’, and thought the displays at Ince Blundell must be the ‘finest statuary collections left in private hands’. That ownership was not to last: in 1959 the family presented many of the sculptures to the city of Liverpool, and a year later the house was sold to the Augustinian Sisters, a Catholic order of nuns, to be used as a care home.

Although the art world was relieved that the works were to be preserved as a single collection, there was sadness that it could not remain, as Geoffrey Grigson wrote, in ‘the delightful setting which Henry Blundell devised for it’. A group of ‘distinguished members of the Georgian Group’ wrote to the Times expressing their dismay that the collection was to be removed. Writing in response, Vere E. Cotton, former Lord Mayor of Liverpool, explained that the Liverpool Corporation had only decided on removing the collection with ‘extreme reluctance’. The corporation had explored constructing a new access to the Pantheon, taking a long lease on the temple and even taking down the Pantheon and rebuilding it in a Liverpool park. But none of the options was feasible.

Only a fraction of the sculpture collection can be seen in Liverpool today, with the majority of the works inaccessible in store. The Walker Art Gallery has a selection of the eighteenth century copies from Ince Blundell on display, but the city’s World Museum has no works on show,

But there is some very good news. Ince Blundell recently became a respite centre where unpaid carers can take a break and relax. As well as ensuring a future for the house, and providing a wonderful resource for the local area, this new use means that public access is possible, and pre-booked guided tours are available (and highly recommended).

The tour includes the Pantheon, which is now bare of sculpture, although some of the niches still display the catalogue number assigned by Blundell. The interior is in reasonable condition, but sadly the reliefs mounted on the exterior are badly degraded.

The Garden Temple can also be seen, but the attached greenhouse is long gone (ruins of the furthest room can be seen, although this was later remodelled as part of a range of glasshouses). The temple was restored in the late 1990s, but damp is an ongoing problem. Some wall-mounted works can still be admired, but the free-standing statuary has been removed.

The vast sculpture collection is listed in Blundell’s own publications, and more recently it has been discussed in depth in the volumes of The Ince Blundell Collection of Classical Sculpture, published from 1991.

House, Pantheon and Temple are listed at grade II*. The park is grade II* registered. Ince Blundell is north of Liverpool and, although originally in Lancashire, it became part of the new county of Merseyside in 1974. You can find Ince Blundell visitor information here. 

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It is getting a bit ‘backendish’ – as they say in Yorkshire – and the Folly Flâneuse is taking a short break. Meanwhile here are some of the wonderful landscape ornaments built by the Lyttelton family at Hagley Park, seen on a perfect autumn day as the leaves begin to turn bronze and gold, and the mist clears to reveal a blue sky.

For those who are not familiar with the delightful term ‘backendish’ it describes that period when we enter the last months of the year, and it suddenly becomes chilly and autumnal (thank you D for introducing the flâneuse to this word many years ago). Hands deep in pockets, the Folly Flâneuse soon warmed up on a brisk walk around the park.

Hagley Park moves to winter opening hours at the end of October. The park and cafe (very welcome at the end of a walk) are open 10-4, but check the website for details https://www.hagleypark.co.uk/

Thank you for reading. The Folly Flâneuse will be back with a folly story next week. Enjoy the seasonal colours.