Georgian Arcadia: Architecture for the Park and Garden
Roger White
(Yale, £40)
THIS book is the result of more than 40 years of country-house estate and garden visiting. The author, an architectural historian and authority on Georgian landscape architecture, has tramped across the terrain in landscape parks and trawled through the published writings on the subject to produce a synthesis of this most alluring topic. The result is a richly illustrated volume, one that merits our attention.
It was first inspired by an exhibition he organised for the Georgian Group in 1987. This was followed in 1991 by another show for the National Trust, curated by the late Gervase Jackson-Stops, himself a compulsive folly fancier, having masterminded a brilliant restoration of Thomas Wright’s Horton Menagerie in Northamptonshire. Several more exhibitions presented by John Harris on country-house views and the 18th-century Rococo artist Thomas Robins, together