For Leisure & Pleasure

From sprawling estates to private plots, it is thanks to some true visionaries that we are able to enjoy the splendid gardens of Warwickshire

- Sally Coffey

Every now and then in this job we come across a place that astounds us and makes us ask: why haven’t we been here before? This is exactly how we feel when we arrive at Compton Verney, a stately home set amid an impressive Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown-designed landscape in Warwickshire, which also happens to be home to a nationally-acclaimed art galley.

It’s hard to believe when you look at the impeccable neoclassical facade of the Georgian house, remodelled by Robert Adam from its previous formal baroque appearance, that less than 25 years ago the house and its grounds stood in ruin.

For centuries Compton Verney was the family seat of the Barons Willoughby de Broke – it was the 14th baron who commissioned Brown to transform the formal gardens using his trademark ‘natural landscape’ style – until the 1920s when it was sold due to financial pressures.

There then followed a period of neglect before the late philanthropist Sir Peter Moores had the foresight to rescue the derelict house and grounds in 1993.

Sir Peter spent the next 11 years reviving the Brown landscape and amassing a collection of Tudor portraits, Chinese bronzes and masterpieces from the Golden Age of Neapolitan Art before opening Compton Verney as an art gallery and park in 2004.

Today visitors can enjoy much of the landscape in the way it was intended by Brown, including one of his famous views from the Upper Bridge, where the house ‘reveals’ itself as you round the huge London plane tree planted by Brown for this very effect.

Trees were integral to Brown’s parkland vision and in the Old Town Meadow – once the site of a medieval village – a replanting programme aims to bring the landscape back to how it was according to an 1818 estate plan.