The Significance of Stowe House By Inskip and Jenkins, Historic Architects Stowe House was the seat of the Temple and Grenville families from the 17th Century until the Great War. The family provided major figures in the political arena of the 18th Century, and the concept of Liberty is symbolised in the iconography of the buildings and the Gardens. The House, framed by its Colonnades on the North Front, forms a propylaea to the Landscape Gardens beyond. The principles of naturalistic gardening, evolved at Stowe by Bridgeman and Kent under Lord Cobham, and by Capability Brown under Earl Temple, placed Stowe amongst the sites of international horticultural interest. Stowe was renowned for being open to visitors in the 18th Century, and public access has continued down to the present day. It is essential to see Stowe as a unity of the House and the Gardens. Stowe House is seen as the greatest monument in the Landscape Garden, which contains over thirty other monumental structures and garden buildings given by the School to The National Trust in 1989. It is one of the most important culturally significant sites in this country, and it is hoped that it will eventually be included in the list of World Heritage Sites. The international importance of Stowe is supported by three factors of great importance: First, there is no question of the quality of the House, garden monuments or the Landscape Garden. The landscape is included in the first category in the Register of the Historic Parks and Gardens, and the House and the majority of the Garden monuments are Grade I in the Statutory List of Buildings of Architectural or Historic Importance. Stowe House was constructed in the 1680's and remodelled throughout the 18th Century by some of the best 18th Century architects, including Vanbrugh, Gibbs, Kent and Soane. The same architects, craftsmen and materials were deployed on the garden buildings. Garden monuments, such as the Corinthian Arch (1765), can be seen as anticipating the work on the House; at other times, they employ materials or labour left over from the House. What is so remarkable about Stowe is that the two parts, the House and the Garden, are so closely interlinked. It is widely acknowledged that the finest approach to the Garden is through the House, with the route through the North Hall and the Marble Saloon providing a fitting introduction to the view of the Garden from the South Loggia, which must be one of the most memorable views in all Europe. What is not universally recognised, is that the restoration of the North Front of the House has resulted in a transformation as significant as that achieved by the National Trust at the Temple of Concord and Victory, and the revealed facade is a fitting prelude to the great work of art that is beyond. Secondly, Stowe is a site of innovation. The House, as it stands today, remains as it was recast by Earl Temple in the 1770's by his cousin Thomas Pitt, developing an initial proposal by Robert Adam. It is, without doubt, one of the earliest neo-classical palaces, and the great Marble Saloon at the centre anticipates by a decade the complexity of the spatial planning introduced by Soane in his idealistic projects. In the Gardens, the earliest Chinese House (1738); the Gothic Temple (1741) and the Temple of Concord (1747-63) rank as the first major Gothic Revival and neo-classical structures in Europe. Within the Garden itself, the use of the ha-ha, derived by Lord Cobham from military engineering during his campaigns under Marlborough, is another first, as is the Grecian Valley, the first large-scale, man-made naturalistic landscape created under Capability Brown in the mid-1740's. Finally, it is important because of the extensive supporting archive. When the estate was dispersed in the 1920's, the family papers were sold to a London bookseller and passed on to Henry Huntington, the American railroad magnate and anglophile collector, and were eventually bequeathed to the Huntington Library in California. The Stowe Papers are almost intact from 1749 until 1923, and are not only a family and political history but also virtually complete building accounts for that period. This has meant that, when working on the restoration of Stowe House or the Garden monuments, nothing has to be left to conjecture and accurate repair or restoration is possible.
