No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
In late March 1860 Sir Edward Page-Turner, 6th Baronet, decided to rebuild his house at Battlesden Park, near Woburn, Bedfordshire. Sir Joseph Paxton, by then famous for his work at the Crystal Palace, was consulted. Having had his first job as a garden boy on the Battlesden estate in the days of Sir Gregory, Sir Edward’s uncle, he was a natural choice. Over-burdened with work and growing old, Paxton suggested his son-in-law, George Henry Stokes, instead, as architect for the project. Together the two men visited the estate and found the old house ‘almost a ruin’. An agreement was quickly reached to build completely afresh with Stokes as the architect, though Paxton appears to have maintained an advisory position throughout construction. By 1864 the new house was finished.
1 Markham Papers, Chats worth, letter 1511, 11 March 1860.
2 Ibid., letter 1516, 27(?) March 1860.
3 More than he wished: ‘Sir E. Turner and Mr. Stokes took up about two hours of my time’ (Markham Papers, letter 1552, 7 Feb. 1861). See also letter 1544, 14 December, 1860.
4 Leighton Buzzard Observer, 25 May, 1886, p. 8.
5 Post Office Directory, Counties of Bedford, etc., 1877, p. 12.
6 Victoria History of the County of Bedford, edited by Page, William, III (1912), 343 Google Scholar.
7 See Chadwick, G. F., The works of Sir Joseph Paxton, 1803-61 (London, 1961)Google Scholar.
8 Now the Calderdale Public Library.
9 In the possession of the Rev. E. G. A. W. Page-Turner, of Woodstock, Oxon., to whom I am most grateful for permission to publish.
10 Leighton Buzzard Observer, 1 December, 1896, p. 3.
11 ‘ . . . the enrichments of the doorways, mouldings, &c, being constructed of ground Parian marble, coloured and veined to imitate Italian marble.’
12 The picture in Leighton Buzzard Observer, 1896, shows here a steep pavilion mansard rather than the hipped roof of the photographs. The tower over the entrance (according to the photographs) was similarly high and with hipped roof whose axis, however, was at right angles to that over the garden front.
13 Bassett, D., ‘“Queen Anne” and France’, Architectural History, XXIV (1981), 83–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.