Sheringham Hall

Sheringham Hall was built in 1813-19 for Abbot Upcher and is related to the landscaped park designed for the purpose by Humphry Repton (1752-1818) who was the leading landscape architect, or ‘landscape gardener’, as he put it, in the country.

Repton described Sheringham as ‘my favourite and darling child in Norfolk’. Abbot Upcher (1784-1819) bought the Sheringham estate in July 1811 for its ‘beautiful and romantic grounds’. When he first saw Sheringham that year, he recorded in his diary, ‘What infinite variety presents itself in this enchanting spot’. Repton explained in his Red Book that Sheringham had ‘more of what my predecessor [‘Capability’ Brown] called Capabilities’ than any he had seen in fifty years. He claimed that architecture was ‘an inseparable and indispensable auxiliary’ to the art of landscape gardening. This unity was nowhere better expressed in Repton’s work than at Sheringham, while the house also demonstrated the attention he paid to the way the house would work for the family and their guests, stressing comfort and convenience, especially at different times of the year. The twentieth-century revival of Sheringham by Tom Upcher, the last Upcher to own it, has been the inspiration for the current owners Paul Doyle and Gergely Battha-Pajor.

The drawings for the house, described as a ‘modern Italian villa’, were due to John Adey Repton (1775-1860), Humphry’s talented eldest son who had worked 1796-1800 in the office of the celebrated architect, John Nash (1782-1835), with whom Humphry had also worked. Nash became the master of the Picturesque, as demonstrated in his Regent’s Park, sometimes seen as the first garden city. This is what Humphry and John Adey Repton achieved on a small scale at Sheringham, for the house appears as quite modest in a wide-ranging landscape when in fact it is a substantial mansion as only the south-facing wing can be seen from the park. Behind this on the north are two large wings at right angles to each other which are hidden so that the house is not seen as a powerful monument dominating the scene, as would have been expected in the eighteenth century.

The walled garden has been redesigned by Arabella Lennox-Boyd (born 1938). A classical openwork pavilion in cast iron was designed by John Simpson and erected in 2012 to mark the sixtieth year of the reign of Elizabeth II and the bicentenary of Humphry and John Adey Repton’s designs for Sheringham. The oak and cast-iron glass houses and cold frames have been restored and new gardens planted outside the walled garden. As suggested in Repton’s Red Book designs, walks with vistas over the gardens and park have been reopened in the plantations to the north of the gardens and house, where some of the rarest Rhododendrons, Camellias and Magnolias at Sheringham are found.

Paul and Gergely have also bought back the Sheringham farming estate, comprising the park, woods and arable land. Visits to Sheringham Hall are by arrangement with the owners. Contact gergely@sheringhamestate.com.