page_title: Eaton Hall, Cheshire
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Eaton Hall, Cheshire / Grounds / History
context_page_description: Eaton Hall is the country house of the Duke of Westminster. It is 1 mile south of the village of Eccleston, in Cheshire, England. The house is surrounded by its own formal gardens, parkland, farmland and woodland. The estate covers about 10,872 acres.
  The first substantial house was built in the 17th century. In the early 19th century it was replaced by a much larger house designed by William Porden. This in turn was replaced by an even larger house, with outbuildings and a chapel, designed by Alfred Waterhouse. Building started in 1870 and concluded about 12 years later. By 1960 the fabric of the house had deteriorated and, like many other mansions during this period, it was demolished, although the chapel and many of the outbuildings were retained. A new house was built but its design was not considered to be sympathetic to the local landscape, and in the late 1980s it was re-cased and given the appearance of a French château.
  The house has been surrounded by formal gardens since the 17th century, the design of which has changed over the centuries in accordance with current ideas and fashions, as has the surrounding parkland.
context_section_description: In the 17th century, formal gardens were created around the Samwell Hall; these included such features as parterres and canals.  However they were costly to maintain, and in the later part of the 18th century fashions changed to favour a more informal type of garden layout. Credit for designing the informal gardens at Eaton Hall has been given to Lancelot "Capability" Brown.  Although one of Brown's documents dated 1764 shows that payment was made to him by the estate, it also notes that a plan for the garden had been drawn up by William Emes.  From this, Marion Mako concludes that, as Brown was an engineer as well as a landscape gardener, the payment was for an engineering project rather than for landscaping.  Emes had been influenced by Brown, although he had not been his pupil.  With his clerk of works, Thomas Leggett, Emes worked in the estate for the next 10 years.  When Robert Grosvenor (later the 1st Marquess) inherited the estate at the beginning of the 19th century, it had become run-down.  The marquess appointed John Webb, a pupil of Emes, to improve the garden and the landscaping.  Among Webb's innovations were new terrace walls behind the house, the levelling of Belgrave Avenue and the planting of 130,000 trees along it, and a serpentine lake to the east of the house alongside the River Dee.  He also arranged for the construction of greenhouses and a kitchen garden.  
  Fashions changed again, and in the 1820s William Andrews Nesfield was employed to design new parterres.  He also built more terracing and a balustraded wall.  Statues, stone urns and vases on pedestals were added to the garden.  In 1852 the Camellia House was built; this was extended in 1870 to its final size of 385 feet (117 m) long, 10 feet (3 m) wide, and 18 feet (5 m) high.  The present kitchen garden was created the same year; this provided the food not only for the hall, but also for Grosvenor House in London.  More greenhouses were built and, by about 1880, 56 gardeners were employed.  There were other building works in the grounds.  Waterhouse created a grotto between the chapel and the stable yard, and designed the Parrot House and a loggia (now known as the Temple).  The Chester architect John Douglas designed the Dutch Tea House in the Tea Garden, and a number of service buildings in the estate.  In 1897–98 Edwin Lutyens started to improve what had been known as the Italian Garden (and is now the Dragon Garden).
  Work continued in the gardens and grounds during the 20th century.  The 2nd Duke commissioned Detmar Blow, a pupil of Lutyens, to re-design parts of the gardens.  With Fernand Billerey, he removed the parterres, built a canal leading away from the house, added hedged compartments to the terraces, and a pond at the base of the terraces (now the Lioness and Kudu Pond).  During the Second World War, part of the parkland was requisitioned as an airfield, and in 1940 some of the garden buildings were damaged by a cluster of incendiary devices.  After the war, improvement of the gardens did not resume until the 1960s, when the wives of the 4th and 5th Dukes worked with the designer James Russell.  Since the early 1990s, the gardens have been further developed under the 6th Duke and his wife, Natalia, working with the garden designers Arabella Lennox-Boyd and Vernon Russell Smith.
caption: Formal garden in the mid-19th century
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