Harold A. Peto

Artist Info

Harold A. PetoLondon, 1854 - 1933, Iford Manor, Westwood, Wiltshire

Peto, Harold Ainsworth (1854–1933), architect and garden designer, was born at 12 Palace Gardens, Westminster, London, on 11 July 1854, the fourth son and sixth of the ten children of Sir (Samuel) Morton Peto, first baronet (1809–1889), civil engineering contractor and politician, and his second wife, Sarah Ainsworth (1821–1892), eldest daughter of Harry Kelsall, a Rochdale textile manufacturer. (Peto's father had two sons and three daughters by his previous marriage.) He spent much of his early childhood at Somerleyton Hall, his father's estate in Suffolk, and was sent to Harrow School for three years from 1869 to 1871 before commencing architectural training with J. Clements of Lowestoft.

In 1874 Peto moved to London to the architectural firm of Karslake and Mortimer before going into partnership with Ernest George in 1876. The firm became one of the most successful in London during the 1880s, building prestigious mansions in Mayfair and at Collingham Gardens in Kensington. They also had a very successful practice as country house builders. In 1881 Peto was elected as an associate of the RIBA and then became a fellow in 1884. During the years of the partnership he travelled widely abroad, with frequent visits to Italy and then in 1887 to America where he made particular note of innovations in design and technology, including elevators, steam heating, ventilation, pneumatic tubes for messages, and sanitation. This new technology was later introduced into some of the commissions which he and George carried out in England.

In the early 1890s Peto's diaries refer to his increasing distaste for life in London and his desire to live in the country and make a garden. In 1892 he resigned from his partnership with George and moved to Kent, and then in 1896 to a house near Salisbury, Wiltshire. In these and the following years he continued to travel on the continent and then further afield, to Egypt in 1892–3, Sicily in 1895, and then the Far East in 1898. His descriptions of his itinerary reveal a growing enthusiasm for gardens and plants; in particular, his stay in Japan provides a vivid account of flowers, gardens, and his experience of flower arranging. This voyage to the East was, he declared in his diary, going to be his last major journey outside Europe.

On his return Peto bought Iford Manor near Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, in 1899, which became his home until his death. When he left the partnership with George he had agreed not to practise as an architect in England; that left him free to design the gardens and garden buildings that were to become his enduring legacy. It is unclear which was his first commission but it seems likely that he agreed to carry out designs for his friend Henry Seymour Trower (1843–1912) at Bridge House, Weybridge, Surrey, in the late 1890s. New projects developed rapidly. Easton Lodge in Essex for the countess of Warwick was one of the earliest major schemes: commissioned in 1902 and under construction by 1903, it constituted a most ambitious programme with a hundred foot long balustraded lily pool at the centre of a sunken Italian garden forming the central feature. In addition the approach from the house led through a yew walk, across games lawns, bordered by elaborate wooden pergolas in the seventeenth-century French style (treillage), and beyond the pool he designed wooded walks in a wilderness or bosquet that included an elaborate tree house in the branches of an ancient oak. A Japanese tea house on the lake completed the ensemble. By the mid-twentieth century the garden had largely gone, but restoration began in the 1970s.

Another of Peto's early designs, dating from 1903, was for Sir John Dickson-Poynder MP at Hartham Park, near Chippenham, Wiltshire. This scheme incorporated architectural features that have become synonymous with Peto's classic style. The long canal at Hartham, traversing the old walled garden and opening into a semicircular water basin in front of an Italian style pavilion, echoed the layout for Bridge House. Crichel House in Dorset, Buscot Park in Oxfordshire, and Heale House in Wiltshire were other major schemes of Peto's under construction in this period. Alongside these he was engaged with the development of his own garden at Iford Manor.

Two major commissions at the end of the Edwardian period were Ilnacullin (Garinish Island) in Bantry Bay, Ireland, for the businessman and politician (John) Annan Bryce, and West Dean, near Chichester, Sussex, for the American millionaire William James. Garinish Island was purchased in 1910 from the War Office and work began there shortly afterwards based on Peto's plan and continued until 1914. The main axis extended from a classical pavilion, similar to the one at Hartham, over a sunken pool towards the tea house and then continued across lawns to the walled garden. A parallel axis, called Happy Valley, ran through a wild garden that is now famous for its subtropical planting. West Dean, begun in 1912, was very different, the project consisting of one three hundred foot long pergola, with a flint chequered garden house at one end and a pool at the centre.

Peto's own garden at Iford Manor, developed throughout the early 1900s, included a grand colonnaded terrace, steps, garden rooms, a lily pool, and a Romanesque style cloister to display his collection of early sculpture; it remains one of his outstanding achievements. His Boke of Iford says much about the making of the garden and his attitude to landscape design:

I had always felt that for a garden to contain the highest development of beauty it must have a combination of Architecture and plants. Old buildings or fragments of Masonry carry one's mind back to the past in a way that a garden entirely of flowers cannot do. Gardens that are too stoney are equally unsatisfactory; it is the combination of the two, in just proportion, which is the most satisfying.

In addition to his work in England Peto developed an important practice on the French riviera near Nice, building some five sumptuous villas in what he called the style of the early Renaissance in Italy, surrounded by terraces, pools, and classical pavilions. The garden writer Avray Tipping said of one of these villas ‘Mr Peto has had the opportunity of showing us exactly what his conception was of a complete place: of the unity of a house and garden where every part is correlated to every other and where the position and character of every fraction ... are as much part of a definite plan as are the rooms in the house itself’ (Country Life, 16 July 1910). After 1918 he continued to advise on earlier work, and in particular spent time on the riviera staying with his clients, but no new commission seems to have been undertaken. This was in part because of post-war economic and social changes, and also because Peto was now in his mid-sixties and the exuberance of life before the war had gone.

Peto, who never married, died at Iford Manor on 16 April 1933 and was buried in Chedington, Dorset. Although his achievements as an architect in the partnership with Ernest George are considerable, he is now best known for designing some of the quintessential Edwardian gardens.

Robin Whalley

Sources

R. Whalley, The great Edwardian gardens of Harold Peto (2007) · H. A. Peto, The boke of Iford (1993) [incl. introduction by R. Whalley] · H. J. Grainger, ‘The architecture of Sir Ernest George and his partners, c.1860–1922’, PhD diss., U. Leeds, 1985 · R. Whalley, ‘Harold Peto: shadows from Pompeii and the works of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’, Garden History, 33/2 (2005), 256–73 · R. Whalley, ‘The plantsman of Iford Manor’, Journal of the Wiltshire Gardens Trust, 31 (1995), 4–11 · D. Ottewill, The Edwardian garden (1989) · b. cert.