A pleasure for the birds

Owletts, Cobham, Kent A property of the National Trust Intensely proud of his Kent ancestry, Sir Herbert Baker restored this unpretentious family house. Clive Aslet revisits the unexpected home of one of Britain’s outstanding Imperial architects

- Clive Aslet

A MOSAIC in the vestibule of the Bank of England shows two Mycenaean lions (guardians of the treasury) standing on a map of the south coast of England. Sharp-eyed viewers will notice that slightly to the east of London is a red tile. It marks the position of Owletts, home of Sir Herbert Baker, who remodelled the Bank from 1925–39.

Baker, the supreme architect of Empire, who designed more than 300 buildings in South Africa before becoming Lutyens’s rival and nemesis in New Delhi, grew up in the house. As a young man, arriving at the Cape to keep an eye on his younger brother Lionel’s venture fruit farm—a project that seemed to promise golden returns and into which their father had put the last of his money —he met Cecil Rhodes (another investor). From that moment, his destiny was fixed. Having laboured for eight years in Sir Ernest George’s office (overlapping with the shorter time that Lutyens spent there), Baker could provide an architectural expression of Rhodes’s Imperial vision that was one-third Ancient Greece, two-thirds Arts and Crafts.