‘A noble mansion’
David Robinson completes the story of Margam Park, Neath Port Talbot, with the building of its magnificent orangery
Kit talks of his house as if it was a thing to be ordered from Bond St like a sugar Palace
Margam Park, Neath Port Talbot, part II A country park managed by Neath Port Talbot Council In the second of two articles, David Robinson looks at the development of Margam from the late 18th century, with the building of a magnificent orangery and the creation of an outstanding Picturesque house in the 1830s
ADECADE after his ennoblement in 1711, Thomas, the 1st Baron Mansel of Margam, invited Francis Smith of Warwick to remodel his seat at Margam in a manner that befitted his new-found nobility. Smith pleaded ill health and the great rambling house described last week—a medieval monastery remodelled in the 16th and 17th centuries—remained intact. Thomas died two years later, in 1723, and the male line of the Mansel family came to an end in 1750. Its patrimony consequently passed to the family of Mary Mansel (d. 1735), who had married John Ivory Talbot (d. 1772) of Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire. The descendants of this match would transform the property.
Their grandson, Thomas Mansel Talbot (1747−1813), marked his majority in 1768 with a Grand Tour. The young man was clearly enthralled with Italy and with Rome in particular, ‘this Queen of Cities’ as he called it. There, in the early 1770s, he spent almost £7,500 acquiring a collection of antique sculpture, works of art, prints, books, furniture, and models of ancient buildings, all of which were shipped to Wales from Livorno on the Tuscany coast.
Unlike his Mansel forebears, Talbot was never greatly interested in public life. He took no active role in politics, nor courted county or national society. As a consequence, almost all that we know of him is derived from family documents, with much set out by one of his direct descendants, Joanna Martin, in The Penrice Letters (1993).
Even before setting off on his Grand Tour, Talbot was familiar with his extensive estates and he was particularly drawn to Penrice on the Gower Peninsula, which he described as ‘the most romantic spot in all the county’. In a letter of 1771, he suggested to his brother that he might ‘leave Margam for Penrice with very little reluctance’ and, soon afterwards, in 1772−73, he commissioned Anthony Keck (Country Life, October 20 and 27, 1988), to design an Italianate villa at the latter. Following his marriage in 1794 to Lady Mary Lucy Fox-strangways (d. 1855), the couple brought up their children at Penrice, surrounded by many of the artworks that Talbot had purchased in Rome.
Talbot, nevertheless, retained an interest in Margam during the 1770s and early 1780s, when the park and its deer, together with the horses and hounds maintained for hunting, were often in his thoughts. Paradoxically, however, it was Talbot’s love of hunting that led him to spend long periods during the 1780s at Grateley in Hampshire, not least as part of an informal association ‘for the promotion of gambling, horse-racing and drunkenness’.
One element of the Margam estate that seems to have captured Talbot’s close interest from a very early stage was its celebrated collection of citrus trees. The origins of this collection are not proven, but it was certainly in existence by 1711 and a gardener’s catalogue of 1727 lists more than 70 plants. The improved winter housing of these delicate fruits was more of a priority for Talbot than
any serious consideration of the residence itself. Hence, as early as 1780, William Emes —then engaged by Talbot on the parkland at Penrice—presented designs for the park at Margam, including ‘finished Drawings for the intended Orangerie’. Talbot rejected these proposals and later asked Anthony Keck to produce a fresh design for an orangery alone. Preparations were finally in hand in 1786, with the principal building work carried out in 1787−90 by William Gubbings, earlier employed as the master mason at Penrice.
Talbot’s magnificent neo-classical orangery survives and, at 327ft from end to end, it lays claim to be the longest and most extensive structure of its kind in Britain (Fig 4). The south front of the orangery proper is lit by a uniform row of 27 round-headed windows, admitting as much light as possible to the interior. Stone was supplied from an estate quarry at nearby Pyle and the five central bays stand slightly forward. At either end are pedimented pavilions, each lit by a single Venetian window. The trees were wheeled in and out through double doors at the back of the building and there were under-floor heating flues. The two pavilions allowed Talbot to unpack the last of his cases of Grand Tour acquisitions, after at least 15 years.
The pavilion to the west, with its marble fireplace, Adamesque detail and a plasterwork frieze, was planned as a library-cum-study. That to the east served as the ‘statue room’ and it was here that Talbot displayed his impressive collection of antique and contemporary sculptures purchased in Rome. The displays also featured models of Roman buildings in cork and pumice stone, together with porphyry and alabaster vases.
The orangery was clearly an outstanding addition to the Margam landscape, but it came at considerable cost. Indeed, half of the building lay directly over the site of the Palladian stable block of a century earlier. In other words, quite purposefully, Talbot had begun to pull down the Mansel house. By 1793, it was all but gone. Talbot wrote to a friend: ‘I am busy [building] an inclosure… from the material of the old mansion… next summer there will only be the old paintings of it to look at, what a mass of building it was.’
An interesting (and unexplained) aspect of this entire process was the way it unwrapped fragments of the medieval Cistercian monastery, notably the chapterhouse and parts of the south transept of the abbey church. The former had already had a chequered post-suppression history, latterly serving as a ‘Coal House’. Given that, in 1794, there was a proposal to remove the entire building ‘to þe top of Port Talbot’, we can be grateful that it survives at all.
Although there is some evidence to suggest that Talbot always intended to build a new house at Margam, there is no indication that he ever consulted an architect with a firm proposal. In any case, nothing was achieved before his death at Penrice in 1813. He was succeeded by his only son, Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot (1803−90), who
was to become one of the greatest figures of Victorian south Wales.
The young Talbot, or ‘Kit’ as he was known to his family and close friends, attended school at Harrow and gained a first in mathematics at Oriel College, Oxford. Although he early indulged a love of sailing (he owned several racing yachts) and foreign travel, he was certainly no playboy. He was an accomplished musician, a talented chess player and an astute art collector. He also retained a keen interest in mathematics, found time to study natural history and geology and developed a taste for archaeology.
As far as his vast estates were concerned, Talbot did much to revolutionise local farming in Glamorgan. At the same time, he was an avid supporter of the increasing industrialisation throughout the county, fostering the growth of the port at Aberavon and later becoming a major figure in the development of the Great Western Railway. Furthermore, in an unbroken sequence from 1830 to 1890, Talbot represented Glamorgan as one of its MPS, initially as a Whig and later as a member of the new Liberal Party.
In 1827, Talbot informed his agent, Griffith Llewellyn, that it was his ‘grand object to restore Margam to what it ought to be, the park and residence of the owner of the property’. A letter of December 1828 from his aunt Lady Elizabeth Feilding (d. 1846) at Lacock Abbey reports: ‘Kit seemed to like this place extremely & is determined to build a Tower to his new house & a large Hall like this.’ Similarly, in a letter sent from Naples some two months later by William Fox-strangways (d. 1865), we read: ‘Kit is here… He talks of his house as if it was a thing to be bought ready made or ordered from a shop in Bond St like a plum cake or sugar Palace.’
Eventually, the man engaged to interpret Talbot’s many ideas was Thomas Hopper (d. 1856), who had established a fashionable practice as a country-house architect. Hopper was joined by the Shropshire-based Edward Haycock (d. 1870), a pupil of Sir Jeffry Wyatville, who appears to have acted as the superintending site architect. Talbot, however, unquestionably influenced the overall outcome. He also kept a very watchful eye on the finances, regularly querying payments and scrutinising accounts.
For the Margam commission, we might reasonably speculate that Hopper was asked to consider two particular buildings as springing points for his ideas. The first of these, Lacock Abbey, has already been mentioned. The second was almost certainly Melbury House in Dorset, well known to Talbot as the principal residence of his mother’s (Foxstrangways) family, Earls of Ilchester.
Construction at Margam began in 1830 and the house itself stood largely complete by 1835. Work on the surrounding terraces, outbuildings and lodges continued into the 1840s. Writing of the main building in 1833, Samuel Lewis noted: ‘A noble mansion, in the style of English architecture which prevailed in the reign of Henry VIII, is now in progress of erection, on a scale suited to the rank and fortune of [its owner]’.
Margam Park, or Margam Castle as it is often known, is a vast Picturesque creation (Fig 1), deliberately sited on a terrace (Fig 3), east of the orangery and monastic ruins, with distant views to the sea and sheltered beneath the wooded hill, Mynydd y Castell. Apart from Lacock and Melbury, the house belongs to a group of vast Regency houses in a Gothic idiom, such as Lowther, Cumbria; Dalmeny, Fife; Ashridge, Hertfordshire; and George III’S castellated palace at Kew (1801−11).
Originally, the family rooms were set around a small courtyard on the west side of the terrace. To the east were the service rooms, coach houses and stables, organised around two further courtyards. Only the west elevation is symmetrical, but an imposing octagonal prospect tower crowns the entire building, undoubtedly inspired by the 16th-century example at Melbury. The principal entrance was by way of a deep and elaborate porch on the north side (Fig 2). Sadly, on passing through this entrance today, we quickly appreciate the full tragedy of a disastrous fire that gutted the building in 1977. This said, the interior retains occasional details, including chimneypieces (Fig 7), together with one truly spectacular space: the staircase. This is a wonderfully theatrical composition, rising into the lower stages of the prospect tower (Fig 5). Light streams down from the windows in the octagon, itself surmounted by a restored plasterwork vault (Fig 6).
Talbot spent as much time as he could at Margam and had four children with his wife, Charlotte, daughter of the 1st Earl of Glengall. He died in 1890, recognised as ‘father of the House’ in Parliament and the richest commoner in Wales. His only son had died due to a hunting accident in 1876, so the estate passed to his eldest daughter Emily Charlotte Talbot (1840−1918). She soon embarked on comprehensive improvements across the estate, including to the gardens and parkland.
Under the terms of Emily’s will, the Margam estate was inherited by her nephew, although administered by trustees. Sadly, as events transpired, the trustees chose to auction the entire contents of Margam Park in 1941 and the estate itself was sold off in 1942. Following military use during the Second World War, the house stood empty. In 1973, it was acquired by Glamorgan County Council. In 1977, West Glamorgan County Council established a country park on the site, the same year in which Talbot’s house was gutted by fire. Since then, important phases of restoration have been carried out in stages. Today, all of the architectural features in the country park are the responsibility of Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council. Acknowledgements: Thomas Methuen-Campbell and Friends of Margam Park