Soane's Pinery-Vinery Glasshouse, Wimpole Walled Garden

The walled garden at Wimpole was built in the 1790s by Philip Yorke, 3rd Earl of Hardwicke; its red-brick walls were heated to protect peach blossom from spring frosts. At the same period the earl employed the architect Sir John Soane to alter the house and several outbuildings, among them a kitchen-garden hothouse, the pinery-vinery, intended for pineapples and vines. The conservation plan written for the National Trust, which reproduces the contractors' accounts, shows the tradesmen paid by the summer of 1794 for a total of about £1,500, while dating the building to about 1795. A gardener's house, raised in 1805 to a design by Thomas West, leans against the back of the glasshouse and absorbs part of its stoking rooms; in 1895 heating engineers from Westminster laid new hot-water pipes.

A German bomb severely damaged the glasshouse in 1941. When the National Trust received the estate by bequest in 1976, the 19th-century glasshouse in the walled garden had gone and the garden was grassed over. Restoration began in the early 1990s; Soane's pinery-vinery was reinstated in 1999, almost completely rebuilt on its original footprint. A November 2014 report from a local gardening club still lists the restoration of "Soane's glasshouse" among future projects.

The conservation plan describes a large lean-to heated glasshouse with a sash roof, dominating the centre of the walled garden; another account places it against the inside of the north wall. Soane designed it as a pinery-vinery: pineapples grown in tan pits, with vines above. The accounts settled in 1794 separate carpentry, brickwork and plastering, painting (the hothouses and melon frames were given four coats of green oil paint), ironwork and glazing, the last amounting to about £156 of the total.

The 1999 rebuilding follows the original footprint. The file quoted by the plan names an architectural practice, Purcell Miller Tritton, to manage the project, and settles on ventilation by opening lights in alternate bays, pivoting rather than sliding, with sliding sashes kept to the roof; the glass roof is flagged as a point of concern for site safety. The same plan describes a 1962 span glasshouse by Messenger & Co in the garden yard, the only survivor of a group that included pineapple pits, forcing frames by Boulton & Paul and a larger 1908 span house by Sendall & Co, taken down in the 1980s.

According to the National Trust, the centre of the garden, about 4.5 acres in all, holds vegetables, herbs and espalier fruit trees, surrounded by herbaceous borders and cutting beds; peonies, scented roses and salvias make up the summer display. Growing follows organic principles in four sections: rotational quads, no-dig, soft fruit and volunteer allotments. The Trust describes a glasshouse in the walled garden packed with chilli plants.

Over 20 per cent of the produce goes to the Harston Hub Foodbank; the rest is sold at the visitor welcome centre or supplied to The Old Rectory café. Historically the pinery-vinery was given over to pineapples, planted in tan pits, and to grapevines.

The walled garden lies about half a mile north-east of the house, in the North Park, and the glasshouse is seen as part of the garden: paths converging on a central pond, herbaceous borders and trained fruit trees. A visit extends naturally to the rest of the estate: the house altered by Soane for the Earl of Hardwicke, the model home farm he built in 1794, and the park shaped by Bridgeman, Brown and Repton, which is listed Grade I on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens. Peonies, roses and salvias enliven the walled garden in summer.