Victorian Glasshouses, West Dean Gardens

The West Dean estate, about six miles north of Chichester, goes back to the manor house built by James Lewkenor in 1622. The present house dates from 1804, when the park was laid out and the kitchen garden, previously east of the stables, was moved and enclosed by walls. The Parks & Gardens UK register places this work between 1800 and 1810; a western extension with flint walls followed in 1818.

Frederick Bower, who bought the estate in 1871, developed the gardens and opened them to the public once a year. William Dodge James acquired it in 1891 and made many improvements, rebuilding and extending the range of glasshouses in the kitchen garden and building the great pergola on the North Lawn. The present glasshouses are the work of the horticultural builders Foster & Pearson; the dates given vary between sources, from 1891-1900 to 1895-1901.

His son Edward James, a patron of Dalí and Magritte, inherited the estate in 1912 and took possession in 1932. In 1964 he conveyed it to the Edward James Foundation, an educational charity that opened West Dean College in 1971 for the study of conservation, crafts and gardening, among other subjects. He died in 1984 and is buried in St Roche's Arboretum.

The glasshouses were completely derelict when, after the storms of 1987 and 1990 that also devastated the park, gardens manager Jim Buckland and Sarah Wain set about restoring them; the kitchen garden was fully restored by 1992. The work has continued since: an appeal was later launched for two glasshouses in poor condition, each needing more than £30,000 of repairs.

The glasshouses stand in the walled kitchen garden, a roughly rectangular enclosure about 150 metres long and 100 metres across at its widest, 140 metres east of the house. Its walls are of flint to the north and north-west and of red brick on the other sides, and inner walls divide it into compartments; in all, more than a mile of walls carries trained fruit trees. The Parks & Gardens UK register describes restored ranges of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century glass, with nursery, frame and pit yards, and counts sixteen glasshouses where the estate itself lists thirteen.

Built by Foster & Pearson, these working houses have herringbone brick floors, and each door still opens with a small original brass catch. They were once heated by a boiler that had to be stoked by hand through the night. Their upkeep remains demanding: they are hand-scrubbed every winter and repainted every four years. In 2015 one of them was closed to visitors and gardeners alike as unsafe, awaiting an urgent overhaul.

The glasshouses remain working spaces. The estate lists orchids, fuchsias, figs, vines, melons and chillies among their contents, and one visitor also noted exotic orchids and peach trees. More than 115 years after they were built they were still producing tomatoes, cucumbers, pineapples and grapes, according to the appeal launched for their upkeep.

Around them the kitchen garden follows a classic Victorian plan of two cross paths and a perimeter path: one cross path is lined with a late-summer border of hot-coloured perennials, the other runs beneath a pear arch. The fruit garden holds around a hundred apple varieties, and a cutting garden completes the picture. The Chilli Fiesta, an annual three-day festival launched in 1995, has not been held at West Dean since 2018.

West Dean Gardens lies at the foot of the South Downs, about six miles north of Chichester on the road to Midhurst; the nearest railway station is Chichester. The visitor centre, designed by Christopher Alexander and completed in 1995, opens onto 92 acres of gardens. Beyond the glasshouses and kitchen garden, the walk continues to Harold Peto's 100-metre pergola, the Sunken Garden and the Spring Garden, then to St Roche's Arboretum, whose two-and-a-half-mile circuit passes Edward James's grave and opens up views of the South Downs. Guided garden tours run through the year.