On my return home, I have looked up the Wentworth Estate in my battered copy of Ian Nairn’s text for Pevsner’s Surrey, a volume Nairn completed, unlike Sussex which defeated him.   He had an ambivalent attitude towards the county, which, as he described on the flyleaf was where he was brought up and produced ‘a deep hatred of characterless buildings and places’.   Of the Wentworth Estate, he writes, ‘Wentworth is a battered, roughcast Gothick house whose grounds were cut up for housing estates and a golf course early this century.   All the natural pinewood landscape was preserved, the houses sited with the utmost care, and the trim kept quite informal – largely gravel roads, no kerbs, rhodedendrons everywhere.   The result is the best expensive suburb on Surrey, well worth a visit in itself’.

This morning I went on a visit to the Wentworth Estate in Virginia Water.   It was a new experience for me because I had no idea that such massive classical houses were still being constructed, although, having now done a bit of research on it, I realise that some of them are being designed by Julian Bicknell and some by my nephew George.   The estate itself was laid out in the 1920s for captains of industry  and stockbrokers to enjoy a semi- country life of golf within easy reach of London and the impresario behind the scheme was a builder-cum-developer called Walter Tarrant who had begun by building arts-and-crafts houses in St. George’s Hill, Weybridge.