Wrest Park

Wrest Park, in Silsoe, Bedfordshire, is a historic country estate made up of a Grade I listed mansion and its surrounding Grade I listed gardens. The house reflects centuries of architectural heritage, while the formal gardens, with their avenues and water features, showcase the grandeur of England’s historic landscapes.

The current house at Wrest Park was built between 1834 and 1839 by Thomas de Grey, 2nd Earl de Grey, who was both the owner and designer. An amateur architect and the first president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, De Grey took inspiration from French architecture he had studied during visits to Paris, particularly from works like Jacques-François Blondel’s Architecture Française (1752). On-site supervision was carried out by James Clephan, who managed the building works but did not design the house itself.

The interiors include some of the earliest examples of Rococo Revival in England, with the Archer Pavilion and the Countess’s sitting room standing out as fine examples. Today, several reception rooms in the house are open to the public. 

The first image shows the Archer Pavilion, designed by Thomas Archer. Positioned at the end of the Long Water, it stands as one of Britain’s most important early Baroque garden buildings, once used as a banqueting or garden house. For me, it’s a highlight of the estate and one of my favourite features to photograph.

Wrest Park is home to an early 18th-century garden that stretches across 92 acres (37 hectares). The original design is thought to have been created by George London and Henry Wise for Henry Grey, 1st Duke of Kent. Later, the layout was reshaped for his granddaughter, Jemima, 2nd Marchioness Grey, with Lancelot “Capability” Brown introducing a more informal, naturalistic style between 1758 and 1760.

The garden is organised around a broad gravel walk, which extends into a long canal leading to a Baroque pavilion designed by Thomas Archer and completed in 1711. Inside the pavilion, visitors can see striking trompe-l’œil paintings of Ionic columns. Batty Langley, another prominent garden designer, was also employed at Wrest during the 1730s.

Brown’s contributions included softening the shapes of the boundary canals, adding a ring of woodland and water around the formal centre, and helping transition the landscape into a more picturesque setting. The layout of the gardens and ornamental buildings was recorded in 1735 by cartographer John Rocque. Over the following century, new features were added, such as an orangery, marble fountains, and the Bathhouse—an unusual structure sometimes described as a Roman bath, grotto, or hermitage—built between 1769 and 1772.

Wrest Park attracted attention from contemporaries. In 1736, Horace Walpole visited and noted the many monuments in the grounds, including tributes to the Duke of Kent’s children, who had all died young, and a monument to the Duke himself, still living at the time.

One particularly charming legacy is a Wellingtonia tree planted in 1856. In its early years, it was brought indoors each December to serve as a Christmas tree—making it one of the earliest surviving examples of the tradition in Britain, and it still exists today.

The Pavilion