Guide books, gardens and gods
By Kate Simon
The guide book is dead. So says leading guide book publisher Lonely Planet. Its marketeers have just launched the ‘anti-guide book’ Experience Series. These guide books that aren’t guide books are by local experts and ‘turn travelling on its head’ to give a new ‘experience-led perspective’. They’re for ‘savvy travellers looking for a more interactive way to explore, based on interests’. They’re yours for £16.99.
Tell me something new. While anything that promotes articles based on and championing experiences over the sterile, PR-fuelled, listicle has got to be a good thing, this repackaged way of suggesting what to do when you travel is, well, a travel guide. Show me a travel editor who wouldn’t want to commission an interesting piece by an expert eye – as long as that person can write.
As evidenced by the very existence of Lonely Planet’s new Experience Guides, the art of telling you to peep through this door or look around that corner will endure. And perhaps nowhere more so, post-pandemic, than on our own doorstep, which restrictions on foreign travel have caused us to re-evaluate. And we’re liking what we’re seeing.
This is particularly good news for areas of the country usually off the tourist map. A case in point is Staffordshire, close to where Phil could be found drinking a recherché pint of Bass on this blog earlier in the week. Too often whizzed through on the M6 or West Coast Mainline, this county is home to one of Britain’s most extraordinary attractions, Biddulph Grange Gardens.
The life’s work of the industrialist and horticulturalist James Bateman, Biddulph Grange offers a cultivated tour of the globe in just 15 acres. The gardens were created in the mid-19th Century by Bateman, with the help of his wife, the plantswoman Maria Egerton-Warburton, and his friend, the artist Edward Cooke. They were arranged as a then-innovative sequence of rooms that evoked the landscapes of Italy, Egypt, China and the Himalaya as seen through the Victorian eye. These beautiful tableaux transport visitors to far-flung places – just steps away from each other.
The result is pure theatre. In the Egypt garden, a stone temple doorway dedicated to the Sun god Ra is guarded by sphinxes, and a dark passage leads to a chamber, lit red by a stained-glass window, in which sits a statue of the monkey god Thoth (created by the English sculptor and naturalist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins). In the China garden, a bridge, pagoda, joss house, Great Wall, and gilded water buffalo (pictured) provide different perspectives at each turn, telling stories about the exotic space.
In all the gardens at Biddulph Grange, man-made forms are intertwined with plants and trees gathered from around the world. Bateman commissioned John Hooker, who later ran the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, to bring him rhododendrons from Sikkim. And what is now the oldest golden larch in Britain was delivered here in the mid 1800s by the Victorian plantsman Robert Fortune.
There are other spectacles to be wowed by, too. The Stumpery creates a natural sculpture from the upturned roots of trees that were removed to create the gardens. The Dahlia Walk – perhaps Biddulph Grange’s most popular attraction – reveals the Victorians’ obsession with this showy bloom. Here the flower is celebrated with its own dedicated and elaborate tiered terrace of nine bays, framed by sharply clipped yew. (Visit in early September to get the full effect.)
There is another journey to take at Biddulph Grange, through the story of Genesis. Bateman, both a devout Christian and member of the Royal Society, created an unusual linear exhibition called the Geological Gallery, marking out a hallway with the seven days of Creation, along which he placed fossils and geological strata. It’s a very visual testimony to this man’s struggle with the conflicting ideas of science and religion.
Three more countries to visit in gardens nearby
Trentham Gardens, near Stoke-on Trent, has a celebrated 19th Century Italianate garden, restored by Royal Horticultural Society Gold Medallist Tom Stuart-Smith. The mile-long lake here was designed by Capability Brown.
The influence of the great French landscape architect André Le Nôtre can be seen in the gardens at Melbourne Hall, near Derby. It’s considered a rare exemplar of an early 18th Century English garden in the French style.
The Japanese Garden at Tatton Park, near Knutsford in Cheshire, is regarded as one of the most faithful to the spirit of the aesthetic outside Japan. It was built by Japanese gardeners using Japanese trees and artefacts from the Japan-British Exhibition in London in 1910.
Phil’s Beer Notes
Small town it may be, but Biddulph has its own craft beer emporium at On Tap, which doubles as a tap room and bottle shop, offering draught craft to take out. Not far from Trentham is the Congress Inn in Longton, a favourite spot among cask beer aficianados, showcasing local microbreweries. Melbourne Hall has its own tap room and bar, The Brewhouse, promising beers from around the world. Respected local brewer Mobberley Brewhouse has opened its second tap room in Minshull Street, Knutsford, specialising in pizzas and deli boards alongside its range of beers.