En route to Claremont, I stopped at St. George’s, Esher, the small, curiously rustic, old village church, where Thomas Pelham-Holles apparently asked Vanbrugh to install a family pew – not just any old pew, but a private side chapel from which the Duke would have found it hard to see anything except the Vicar in his fine double-decker pulpit.  You might have thought that he could have afforded to build a new church.

The church – charming and very unusual:-

The Newcastle Pew from outside:-

The interior of the church:-

And the Newcastle Pew, very correct in its architecture and so not very obviously Vanbrugh.  Maybe he was becoming more correct in his old age:-

I have been planning to go to Claremont for ages.  What I hadn’t realised is that by far the best of the surviving buildings – Vanbrugh’s brick belvedere – is not actually part of the landscape gardens looked after by the National Trust, but part of the estate of Claremont Fan Court School which now occupies the Capability Brown/Henry Holland house which replaced Vanbrugh’s original palatial mansion after it had been demolished by Lord Clive. So, you can only see it from a distance (the telephoto is deceptive).

Built in 1717, it maybe marks the beginning of Vanbrugh’s half-serious, half-playful medievalism which led him to design Vanbrugh Castle for himself two years later.  It is perhaps not surprising that Jonathan Swift likened Vanbrugh’s design style to a child’s because he uses very simple brick forms in a highly imaginative way.  Swift intended it as an insult, but Vanbrugh may have taken it as a compliment:-

I spent a wonderful day at Grimsthorpe today – a great Vanbrugh house and surprisingly easy to get to from London (twenty miles or so north of Stamford, Lincs), but hard to photograph because it faces north (the other façades were never built):-

I have been encouraged to share my article on the Kunstsilo in Kristiansand.  Well worth a visit.  They are showing an exhibition of work by Edmund de Waal and Axel Salto from September 27th.