This fine brick arch is one of the few surviving eighteenth century features of the designed landscape of Gobions in Hertfordshire. The mansion is long gone, and much of the park has been developed for housing and a golf course, but the arch still stands – although it has come very close to collapse.

The exact early history of the arch is not known, but it is generally accepted to have been built for Jeremy Sambrooke (died 1754), who bought the estate in the first decade of the eighteenth century. It is attributed to the architect James Gibbs, who is known to have designed garden buildings for Gobions (also often referred to as Gubbins), but to date no documentary evidence has been found.

The arch straddled an entrance which led to a tree-lined drive down into the park, laid out to a design attributed to Charles Bridgeman, although Sambrooke himself probably made a significant contribution. By 1726 visitors could admire woods cut through with walks and ornamented with canals, statues and an ampitheatre.

Although a number of contemporary accounts describe the fine park in some detail, the arch is not mentioned and hence it remains something of a mystery, although it is clearly shown on a map thought to have been drawn before Bridgeman’s death in 1738 (above).

John Hunter, a wealthy merchant, bought the Gobions estate in 1777. It seems that he removed the formal gardens admired by earlier generations and naturalised the park, his principal interests being ’tillage and grazing’. Early editions of Ambulator: or, A pocket companion in a tour around London, describe the delightful formal pleasure grounds, but by the time the 6th edition appeared in 1793, Gobions was described as ‘once famous for its fine gardens in the ancient taste’. Happily, the arch survived under the new owner.

In 1786 the Brookmans estate, which stood adjacent to Gobions, was bought by Samuel Robert Gaussen. His descendant Robert William Gaussen added the Gobions estate to his land holdings after John Hunter’s death in 1827, and in 1842 the Gobions mansion was dismantled and sold for the materials after Gaussen decided to ‘throw Brookmans and Gobions parks into one’. By this date the tithe map shows that the arch was known as the ‘folly’ and the open meadows beyond as ‘Folly Park’.

A fire in 1891 destroyed the Brookmans house, and the Gaussens created a new home in the stable block. In 1911 the estate, now known as Brookmans Park, was home to Hubert Gaussen, and he gave permission for the Herts County Open Speed trials to take place in his grounds. This wonderful photograph captures Jack Holroyd, on his Motosacoche motorcycle (described in 1911 as ‘The Motorcycle that is Booming’), setting off over the starting line. Although Holroyd was not the fastest on the day, he did go on to have great success, and later manufactured his own models as well as running a motorcycle shop on Regent Street, London.

The Gaussen family offered the estate at auction in 1923 and it was bought by developers to create the ‘Brookmans Park Estate’ in the ‘gently undulating and well-wooded country on the borders of Middlesex and Hertfordshire’. The rural setting was always emphasised in advertisements, and a 1929 sales pitch made the rash promise that the ‘Home Farm will always supply Grade A milk, real new-laid eggs, and fresh butter to residents’ (today a trip to Sainsbury’s at Potters Bar is required). The Brookmans Park railway station opened in 1926, and a golf course in the former parkland in 1930. Meanwhile ‘Country Homes 35 Minutes from Town’ were snapped up by buyers keen to live in bucolic Brookmans Park, for as the sales brochure noted ‘under the strenuous conditions of modern city life, country surroundings are becoming not so much a luxury as a necessity’.

Happily the arch and its lodge were left in peace on the edge of the estate, although the lodge had fallen into disrepair. In the early 1990s the lodge, complete with folly arch, was offered for sale: although the Gobions Woodland Trust, already custodian of parts of the park, was keen to buy the arch, it went instead to a private buyer who built a new house to replace the derelict lodge.

Meanwhile the grade II* listed arch, patched up on a number of occasions over the centuries, had fallen into a very poor condition, with a huge crack above the arch, and the North Mymms Greenbelt Society appealed to English Heritage to take action and save the folly from collapse. The arch was propped up whilst discussions continued between English Heritage, the private owner of the lodge and arch, and local amenity societies. It took four years to resolve the situation and for work to begin. The restoration was completed in 2023.

The arch remains in private ownership, but can easily be seen at the junction of Swanley Bar Lane and Hawkshead Road: the pretty old sign in the postcard above has gone, but you can’t miss the mailbox at the lodge.

You can also walk in the former parkland (listed grade II) and enjoy views back to the arch. The woodland is now managed by the Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust.

For lots more on Brookmans Park see the excellent North Mymms History Project website. You can read more about the nabob John Hunter here.

The Flâneuse must conclude with the story that a farthing was placed between each pair of bricks when the arch was constructed. No evidence of this extravagance has yet been found.

Thank you for reading. As ever, you are encouraged to scroll down to the comments box to share any thoughts.

Soon after her marriage in 1816 Princess Charlotte of Wales, only daughter of the future George IV and his estranged wife Caroline of Brunswick, settled at Claremont House in Surrey with her husband Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The Princess ordered the construction of a gothic summerhouse on the spot where she first alighted on the estate, and called the retreat her ‘House on the Hill’. In the spring of 1817 there was great public rejoicing when it became known that the Princess was expecting a child who might one day be king or queen.

The site chosen for the Gothic Temple was on high ground with a view to the lake with its island and temple, and on the slope below the new building was the great turf amphitheatre created by Charles Bridgeman in the 1720s. On the 25th of October 1817 the Princess was taken to view the work at the temple, which was to be her place of ‘retirement in warm weather’. But only a few days later ‘calamity arrived that robbed the nation of its dearest hopes’ – on 5 November Princess Charlotte’s child was stillborn, and the princess herself died the following day.

A distraught Prince Leopold decided to adapt the almost-completed summerhouse as a monument to his late wife. The interior was redesigned to favour more sombre colours, and representations of grief were included in the designs for the painted glass doors. Contemporary reports name the architect as John William Hiort (1772-1861) whose career was championed by Sir William Chambers, but other sources suggest that John Buonarotti Papworth (1775-1847) and Augustus Pugin (1769-1832) also contributed to the design.

In 1818 Prince Leopold granted permission for the public to visit Claremont ‘during his absence on the continent’. The newspapers reported that ‘immense crowds’ descended upon Esher to visit the house and park, where could be found the ‘small and elegant Gothic mausoleum’. The building was incomplete at that date, and the visitors would not yet have seen the painted glass being prepared by the ‘ingenious artist’ Joseph Backler (c.1788-1848). In 1819 the public had a chance to see the designs when Backler displayed the windows in his London gallery. They were then installed in the mausoleum where they cast a ‘chastened mellow light’ on the ornately plastered interior. Before her premature death the princess had sat for the sculptor Federico Nicoli: the portrait bust was completed posthumously and placed on an altar in the mausoleum (although by 1844 it had been replaced by a plaster copy).

The poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon contributed some ‘Lines on the Mausoleum of Princess Charlotte’ to Ackermann’s Forget Me Not; a Christmas and New Year’s Present for 1824. The poem ends:

It is the monument where Hope
And youthful Love sleep side by side,
Raised by the mourner to the name
Of her—his lost, but worshipp’d Bride.

In March 1843 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert walked in the ‘delightful’ pleasure grounds at Claremont and ‘visited the little Mausoleum, which is so pretty, & in such a charming spot’. There must have been a moment of quiet contemplation for the queen, for had Charlotte and her son lived Victoria would not have ascended to the throne. That evening Queen Victoria recorded in her diary that she and Albert had ‘talked of building something of the kind for our resting place’, thus anticipating the building of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore House (Victoria’s diaries also record her interest in the mausolea at Castle Howard, Belvoir Castle and Wentworth Woodhouse).

Queen Victoria commissioned the sculptor Francis John Williamson (1833-1920) to execute a memorial to Princess Charlotte. Initially the queen suggested it might be placed in the mausoleum, but Williamson persuaded her that it would not be seen to advantage in the dimly-lit interior, and it was placed in Claremont House. In 1910 the Duchess of Albany, then resident at Claremont, gave it to the Church of St George, Esher, where Princess Charlotte had worshipped during her short life at Claremont.

The Claremont estate was sold by the Crown in 1922 and the mausoleum was demolished later that same decade with remarkably little contemporary comment. A 1931 newspaper reported that ‘the last tangible links between Princess Charlotte and the Claremont Estate are disappearing one by one’, and noted that the most recent to go was the mausoleum, with the land required for ‘building schemes’. It was at this point that it dawned on the Folly Flâneuse why there had been so little fuss – the building was not a mausoleum at all.

Princess Charlotte was actually buried in St George’s Chapel in Windsor, and what Prince Leopold created was a cenotaph or memorial. As early as 1819 an article in Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts suggested that the name was incorrect, and that ‘Gothic Temple’ was more appropriate, but ‘Mausoleum’ seems to have stuck and this is the name used on Ordnance Survey maps. As the building did not house human remains, and this was long before listed building status offered some protection, the ‘mausoleum’ could simply be pulled down (although King George V and Queen Mary were apparently asked for their consent).

The very sad ending to the story is that the land never was developed, and the building was demolished in vain. In 1949 the gardens at Claremont were given to the National Trust (the mansion is in private hands as Claremont Fan Court School). In 2017, marking the bicentenary of Princess Charlotte’s death, the National Trust commissioned ‘Props and Sets’ to create a replica of the mausoleum on the footprint of the original, with a stone bearing Leopold’s poignant words ‘My Charlotte is gone’. The replica monument has since been removed, although the footprint and stone remain.

For more on Claremont see https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/surrey/claremont-landscape-garden

The church at Esher is in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust – see their website for access arrangements. If you are planning to visit between 16 October and 16 December 2023 then note that the church is open for the sale of charity Christmas Cards https://www.visitchurches.org.uk/visit/church-listing/st-george-esher.html

Thank you for reading. If you can add to the story in any way, or simply wish to share your thoughts, do please scroll down to the comments box at the foot of the page.