Cobham Hall Garden

A great Elizabethan house, with seventeenth and eighteenth century additions, set in a deer park which no longer has deer. Humphry Repton produced a Red Book for the garden (c1790) and it is being restored the Cobham Hall Heritage Trust. The bastion and balustrade Humphry Repton designed survive and have been restored, as has a section of Repton's wire fence. His grand plan for making gardens round what was a big house in a bare landscape is very much in evidence. The 'Elizabethan' gardens in front of the house were not part of Repton's scheme - they were designed by a Cobham Hall school teacher (Kathleen Faure) in the 1980s.  The area east of the house has a small temple and a pumphouse designed by Repton. Repton hoped to 'astonish some of the improvers in modern serpentine gardening' by proposing a 'broad and stately mall along a straight line of terrace'.