Please note that this event is sold out. If you would like to go on the waiting list please contact Wootton Village Hall Talks.
Tickets £6. More information.
Oliver Cox is a historian based at Oxford University and will be talking about the work of the great landscape architect, Lancelot "Capability" Brown - with the 300th anniversary of his baptism celebrated in August this year. Brown is often referred to as "England's greatest gardener" and designed over 170 parks and gardens surrounding the finest country houses in Britain.
Brown's work still endures at Blenheim Palace, Croome Court, in Worcestershire (where he also designed the house); Warwick Castle, Badminton House in Gloucestershire; Harewood House, in Yorkshire; Bowood House in Wiltshire; Appuldurcombe House on the Isle of Wight; Milton Abbey in Dorset; and, in traces, at Kew Gardens - as well as many other locations.
He was called "Capability" Brown because he would often tell his landed clients that their estates had great "capability" for landscape improvement.His style of smooth undulating grass - which would run straight to the house, clumps, belts and scattering of trees and his serpentine lakes formed by invisibly damming small rivers - was a new departure within the English landscape, a "gardenless" form of landscape gardening, which swept away almost all the remnants of previous formally-patterned styles.
Oliver has a doctorate from Oxford and has published widely on Gothic Revival architecture, landscape gardening, patriotism, and is currently writing From Addison to Austen: A Short Guide to the Long Eighteenth Century. He created the Thames Valley Country House Partnership in 2013 as a way of linking entrepreneurial ideas in the heritage sector with researchers at Oxford.. In his position as Knowledge Exchange Fellow, he has co-ordinated a range of collaborative projects with country houses, and is the Knowledge Based Supervisor for Trusted Source - a Knowledge Transfer Partnership in partnership with the National Trust.
Oliver is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Council Member of the Oxfordshire Records Society, and a member of Arts Council England’s Designation Panel .
