BURTON MANOR

BURTON MANOR

The Village, Burton, Neston, Cheshire CH64 5SJ

THE GARDENS AND ICE HOUSE

The Gardens

The large gardens of Burton Manor are one of the College’s most attractive features. The original design for the gardens, by Professor A. Beresford Pite, included an Orangery, pavilions and terracing. However this scheme was never fully realised and the main garden design was by celebrated landscape architect, Thomas Mawson.

Mawson had an extensive practice based in Lancaster, but had also worked locally. His clients included William Hesketh Lever, 1^st Viscount Leverhulme, who engaged him from 1905 to collaborate on the gardens of Thornton Manor. Mawson also worked with Lever on the 50 acre Moorland Gardens at Rivington Pike, at the Hill in Hampstead and on the 400 acre Leverhulme Park, given to Bolton by Lever in 1917. Mawson became the first President of the Institute of Landscape Architects in 1929 and was a founder member of the Royal Fine Arts Commission.

The Burton Manor gardens today are more or less as Mawson designed them with parterres, lily ponds, borders and a woodland walk. One garden walk, with a temple-like garden house has been incorporated in the grounds of an adjoining house. The sunken beds enclosed by yew hedging in the south garden have been raised to ground level with two ‘modern’ buildings erected on the west and north sides.

There are now three geometric gardens to the east, south and north. The east garden is reached from the south garden via an ornamental stone gateway with elaborate wooden gates. It is a sunken parterre overhung with mature trees. The south garden has clipped yew hedges dividing it into formal compartments of lawn and flowerbeds on either side of a canal-shaped lily pond. The north garden is an elegant enclosure raised above and reached by steps from the forecourt. Here another rectangular lily pond fits in with pleasing proportions into the space formed by the front façade of the Manor and the rear of the stable block, Squirrel Lodge, on the north side.

More of Mawson’s work can be seen elsewhere. On the outskirts of Birkenhead he designed gardens for the Priory in Upton Road, Claughton, though the pine glades and Chinese summer house have long since vanished. In Prenton Lane he advised the architect William Glen Dobie on the gardens for his house, Braeside, built in 1908. He was also responsible for the gardens of the Arts and Crafts house, Meadowlands, at Mere in Cheshire, and working with the architect C.E.Mallows for the magnificent grounds of Tirley Garth, Willington. The gardens of Burton Manor are thus part of an important tradition of garden design.

The Ice House

An unusual feature of the gardens of Burton Manor is the ice house. Before refrigerators were invented, ice was harvested in the winter and stored in special buildings called ice houses. From the mid 18^th Century until the start of the 20^th Century many great houses had such a store in which ice could be kept until summer.

The practice of collecting and storing winter ice and snow was introduced into Britain from France in the mid 17^th Century. At the time to have ice in summer was considered a luxury but by the early 19^th Century the use of ice, particularly for food preservation and for the preparation of ice cream, water ices and iced drinks was common among the wealthier sections of society.

The key feature of most ice houses was that as much of the structure as possible was built below the ground to take advantage of the lower and constant temperatures found below the surface. The roof of the ice house would be domed or barrel-vaulted with an artificial mound above and the ice stored in this egg shaped ‘ice-well’. Melting ice was drained from the bottom of the well with an air trap constructed to prevent the melt water flowing back. It was essential to prevent the straw, packed round the ice, from becoming saturated and so losing its insulating properties.

Ice houses fell into disuse from the late 19^th century when block-ice, cut from frozen lakes in North America and Scandinavia, became readily available. At Burton, under the Gladstones, there was no need for the ice house as a game larder and several other larders had been incorporated on the north side of the new kitchen wing and block-ice would have been readily available in the port of Liverpool.