Chapter 4 - Reading The Plans

Summary

THE PLANS IN the revised corpus of Bridgeman's work create a baffling sense of heterogeneity. There are plans which are in ink and watercolour, some with cartouches, some with compass wheels. There are plans in pencil and brown ink with detailed annotations. There are plans in pencil overdrawn with corrections. They are almost all on paper, but of a variety of thickness and quality. They range considerably in size. The biggest, the plan for Gobions in Hertfordshire (MS Herts Map a.1), is very large indeed, covering an entire table top when unfolded. The smallest, for example the plan for Wolterton (MSGD a4 fo.56), are roughly the same size as a sheet of a3 paper. It is hard to make sense of such a multiplicity of media and presentation. However, if we see them as part of a process of physically building on the land a design which originated in Bridgeman's imagination, they begin to make more sense. If we assume that the presence of a design indicates that the new garden had already been commissioned, then one purpose of a drawing must have been to help a client to visualise an entirely new landscape, or, at the very least, new features in an existing landscape. However, this cannot have been the only purpose of a plan. At some point in the construction process there must also have been documents with detailed measurements which would have allowed a foreman and labourers to accurately create Bridgeman's design on the land. There had to be clarity, and presumably instructions, framed in such a way that it was not even always necessary for Bridgeman to be present; in other words, there had to be working drawings as well as those designed for presentation.

Bridgeman's clients and those who facilitated the building of his designs must have shared with him a mutual understanding of the coding, the signs and symbols he used on his plans. So it follows that the decisions Bridgeman made, consciously or unconsciously, with regard to the way a plan was created were based on custom and practice, and presumably informed by the graphic conventions with which he and his clients were most familiar.