Friends of Rousham
Monty Don
“Rousham is one of the truly great gardens of the world and certainly one of my own personal favourites.
I first visited it 40 years ago and have been back many times since with each visit feeling like a revelation and a gift. This is despite – perhaps because of – the fact that it is integrated into its landscape and setting better than any other surviving British garden.
One of the unique features of British gardens is their relationship with landscape, sometimes subtle, often staggeringly beautiful but always dependent upon sensitive and careful management.
Rousham teaches, better than any other garden I know, that an awareness and empathy with the surrounding landscape can have the same cultural and creative significance and contribution as our greatest historic buildings.
So to radically alter that landscape is to corrupt and destroy one of Britain’s most important and sublime works of art. It is vandalism on a shocking scale. It cannot and must not be allowed to happen.
Kent is the great genius of eighteenth-century garden design and Rousham is his masterpiece, one of the greatest gardens in the world”
Monty Don is an English horticulturist, broadcaster, and writer who is best known as the lead presenter of the BBC gardening television series Gardeners’ World.
Chris Smith
“Rousham is a masterpiece of landscaping; William Kent excelled himself in creating a paradise here. The creation of great landscape gardens is one of the unique things that Britain has gifted to the world. And Rousham is this art at its very peak. We desperately need new housing across the country, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of such an iconic and wonderful place.”
Chris Smith (Lord Smith of Finsbury) was Secretary of State for Culture from 1997 to 2001, Chairman of the Environment Agency from 2008 to 2014, and Chairman of the Art Fund from 2014 to 2024. He has now been elected as Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
Arthur Parkinson
“Rousham is an old-world gem of a place that has managed to remain one of the most uncommercial and untouched of Britain’s stately gardens. As a nation, our most beautiful assets are these places that the world sees and imagines as a green and pleasant land, oases of calm and thought. We cannot allow them to be swamped and forsaken for this hand over fist rush of unsustainable and ill thought new build housing designed to meet targets. This is especially true when so many derelict buildings in urban areas remain overlooked and are not developed and added to existing communities where infrastructure already exists to support new homes and lives. I stand in supporting Rousham’s beautiful outlook for its local community and indeed for our country at large”.
Arthur Parkinson is a gardener, award-winning broadcaster, best-selling author, influencer, artist and florist.
Adam Nicolson
“Rousham has a kind of perfection few other places have. It is a hugely important and visionary work of art, which depends for its beauty on a landscape frame that contributes to it at every turn. No garden is an island. They all draw at least part of their life from the world around them. That is more true of Rousham than most and a Rousham severed from its surroundings, or living in surroundings that have been made unrecognisable, would no longer be the place that has been loved and celebrated for almost 300 years. “
Adam Nicolson, FSA, FSA Scot, FRSL is an English author who has written about history, landscape, great literature, the sea and, more recently Birds. He has worked as a journalist and columnist on the Sunday Times, the Sunday Telegraph, the Daily Telegraph, National Geographic Magazine and Granta, where he is a contributing editor. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Society of Antiquaries and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland. He has worked on tevelision and radio.
Jasper Conran
‘Rousham’s park and garden, designed by William Kent in the early 18th century is without a doubt one of his greatest works and arguably the jewel in the crown of English garden design of that period. It is also remarkable in that it has managed to survive intact for three hundred years. There can be no doubt of its tremendous cultural importance and any threat to its setting would be nothing short of tragic.’
Jasper Conran OBE is a British designer. He has worked on collections of womenswear and for the home, as well as productions for the stage in ballet, opera and theatre. Conran published his first book, Jasper Conran Country in 2010. The 300-page photographic essay was completed during a year of exploration around the English countryside.
Alan Titchmarsh
‘Rousham is unique. No other British garden offers such a clear and original demonstration of 18th century landscape design and the work of that most important exponent of the art William Kent. Anything which alters or interferes with the surroundings of this masterpiece must be resisted or its glorious legacy will be compromised forever. We owe it to those who come after us to ensure that Rousham maintains its integrity and its inspirational beauty.
Alan Titchmarsh CBE DL VMH is an English gardener, author and broadcaster. After working as a professional gardener and a horticultural journalist, he became a radio and television presenter and a novelist.
Tom Stuart-Smith
“I count myself amongst the hundreds of designers who would say that Rousham is their favourite garden of all time. It has a uniquely special place in our cultural heritage and that needs protecting.”
Tom Stuart-Smith OBE is an English landscape architect, garden designer and writer. He specialises in making gardens that combine naturalism and modernity.
Liz Nicholson
“Rousham is a unique sanctuary in a fast-moving world. The longevity of the original design defines sustainability in the landscape. The landscape at Rousham is invaluable as a positive reference and inspiration to not only professionals in the industry but also thousands of visitors who visit as a pilgrimage of sorts!
While I accept the imperative need for increased housing in the UK, I would urge us to design mindfully around irreplaceable historic assets like Rousham. If we disregard these beautiful places, we will lose our Genus loci…. and diminish the beauty that makes living in Oxfordshire so special. Please can we take care?”
Liz Nicholson is managing director of Nicholsons, the garden design and creation company in Oxfordshire. Liz also enjoys garden judging with the RHS and has recently joined the council to support the RHS in its sustainability endeavours.
Roger White
“It is generally accepted that Kent was a key figure in the evolution of the English landscape garden, which is often cited as this country’s most original contribution to European visual culture; and Rousham in turn is likewise accepted as his most perfectly preserved garden. It follows inexorably from this that Rousham is a cultural monument of European significance.
Part of the essence of Kent’s vision of the landscape garden is that, as Horace Walpole put it in 1780, ‘he leaped the fence and saw that all Nature is a garden’. Nowhere exemplifies this better
than Rousham, where he consciously sought to draw the visitor’s eye out beyond the boundaries of the garden proper and into the surrounding countryside. This was done by means of architectural features such as the ‘Temple of the Mill’ and the eye-catcher arch on the horizon to the north, both of which survive. These are shown in Kent’s own sketch (still preserved at Rousham) and they function today in exactly the way Kent envisaged. The point, therefore, is that it is not enough simply to preserve the Grade I listed landscape garden. The further visual setting in views northwards from the Terrace is intrinsic to Kent’s vision, and therefore anything that threatens it is potentially disastrous. Such a threat is posed by the very large proposed development just over the horizon at Heyford Park, and by the inevitability that it would result in the progressive urbanisation of this currently unspoilt rural area; the volume of traffic along the road between the garden and the Temple of the Mill, for instance, would rise progressively, threatening in turn the medieval bridge over the River Cherwell shown in Kent’s drawing.
This must not be allowed to happen!”
Roger White is an architectural and garden historian, formerly Secretary of both the
Georgian Group and the Garden History Society (now Gardens Trust). He has written and published both on Rousham and on William Kent. See his chapter in William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain, 2014, and also his book entitled Georgian Arcadia (2023).
Dan Pearson
“Rousham is a national treasure and a fine example of a garden that exists well beyond it’s boundaries. It’s borrowed views were always intended to be and have remained an essential part of the pastoral setting. They allow your eye and mind to travel and must be considered with great care as we move into a time of uncertain futures and pressure upon our rural landscapes.”
Dan Pearson OBE is an English landscape designer and Garden Designer, specialising in naturalistic perennial planting and a Garden writer.
Hal Moggridge
“Rousham Garden is indeed one of the most important works of art in Britain, the garden and with the countryside visible from the garden. As I wrote in my conservation plan of 1983: ‘Rousham garden was designed to “lay open the adjacent country” (Switzer) so as to throw open the “whole estate into a kind of garden” (Addison)’ (In the case of Rousham land to the north and east which is not in fact a part of the Rousham estate).
What is needed is a clear understanding by those planning the new Heyford Park village that views from Rousham must be safeguarded absolutely. A binding planning condition is needed that no part of anything built at Heyford Park is to be visible from Rousham Garden, and if it should be visible it must be removed immediately at the developer’s expense. This should safeguard countryside views from Rousham Garden.”
Hal Moggridge is a British architect and landscape architect, co-founder of Colvin & Moggridge and former Professor of Landscape Architecture at Sheffield University; a past president of the Landscape Institute and a commissioner of the Royal Fine Art Commission. Moggridge received a CBE for services to landscape architecture.
Arne Maynard
“Rousham is one of my favourite historic gardens – it’s such an important part of our landscape history and is a place I and many others return to again and again for inspiration and solace.
It is an iconic garden, designed by William Kent in the 18th century and remains one of the most well preserved examples of his work. The views out to the surrounding countryside are integral to how the garden interacts with its landscape. It’s ’sense of place’ is perfect.
These views, along with the essence of this garden, are at grave risk of being destroyed, if current plans for nearby Heyford Park go ahead. Please sign the petition to help protect Rousham for future generations.”
Arne Maynard is a garden designer and passionate gardener. He is known for his award-winning gardens at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Chelsea Flower Show (2000, 2012) and for his beautiful and sympathetic gardens for private houses across the world.
Advolly Richmond
“Rousham was one of the first gardens that we visited when I was studying Garden History nearly 15 years ago. Its history was instrumental in forging my passion for Italian Renaissance gardens and their influences. Rousham is beautiful and unique, it is a gem in the crown of Britain’s garden history and as such it must be protected.”
Advolly Richmond is a plant, garden and social historian based in Shropshire. A fellow of the Linnean Society, she is also a Champion for the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. She lectures and writes on a variety of subjects from the 16th century through to the early 20th century and teaches Garden History at the Department for Continuing Education at the University of Oxford. She also contributes garden history features on BBC`s Gardener’s World.”
Dr Susan Weber Soros
“In 2013 I co-curated the giant retrospective on the work of William Kent at the Bard Graduate Center in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Rousham was praised and highlighted as one of Kent’s greatest contributions to landscape design. The garden at Rousham has been explored by many prominent British garden specialists including John Dixon Hunt, Mavis Batey, and Kenneth Woodbridge, Rousham is a rare three-hundred-year-old garden that Hunt wrote of as reflecting Kent’s “genius in the landscape…especially since this landscape has survived blessedly intact.” It would be a crime if the views from this garden would not survive due to development of its surrounding countryside, Rousham belongs to the world of art, design, and gardening for succeeding generations. It is part of our irreplaceable cultural heritage.”
Susan Weber is an American historian. She is the founder and director of the Bard Graduate Centre (BGC )for studies in the decorative arts, design history, and material culture affiliated with Bard College in Dutchess County, New York. She is the author of ‘William Kent: Designing Georgian Britain.
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith
“Rousham was one of the first gardens I ever visited as it was not so far from where we lived at Cuddesdon and I vividly remember its combination of parkland, paths and garden monuments, laid out in the early 1720s, originally to designs by Charles Bridgeman.
Alexander Pope described to Brigadier Dormer in November 1726 how ‘I was at Rousham twice last summer in a visit which I find extremely improv’d’ and a couple of years later he revisited, describing to Martha Blount how it was ‘I lay one night at Rowsham which is the prettiest place for water-falls, jets, ponds inclosed with beautiful scenes of green and hanging wood, that I ever saw’.
It was no doubt inevitable that the government’s task force looking for potential sites for new towns should have chosen some sites in areas of natural beauty. One of them is the old RAF airfield at Upper Heyford, just north of Rousham, and there is an inevitable risk that development will blight the view of the unspoilt countryside immediately north of Rousham.”
Sir Charles Saumarez Smith CBE is a British cultural historian specialising in the history of art, design and architecture. He was the Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 2007 until he stepped down in 2018. He was previously director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1994 to 2002 and director of the National Gallery from 2002 to 2007. He has published various articles and books.
Sir Niall Ferguson
“Rousham is not in my backyard, so my opposition to Heyford Park as a possible New Town is not a case of NIMBYism. Clearly, there is a chronic housing shortage in the southeast of England. But there are ample ‘brownfield’ sites and partially developed areas available for the building of new homes. Though the house dates back to the 1630s, Rousham House and Gardens are a pristine product of English 18th-century architecture and design — William Kent’s masterpiece. To visit them is to travel back through centuries of time. To surround Rousham with 13,000 new houses, and all that would go with them, would quite simply be a crime.”
Sir Niall Ferguson, is a British-American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. In 2004, he was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world. Ferguson has written and presented numerous television documentary series, including The Ascent of Money, which won an International Emmy Award for Best Documentary in 2009. In 2024, he was knighted by King Charles III for services to literature
Andrew Lawson
“The gardens surrounding the precious 18th century site of Rousham are among the most treasured surviving gardens in Britain. It is essential that they are preserved as carefully now as they have been for the last 200 years.“
Andrew Lawson is a British photographer, artist and author. He gained recognition in the late 1980s as one of the UK’s leading garden photographers promoting British gardens to the public through books and magazine contributions. Since taking up photography in his late 30s he has written and contributed to over 70 books and received numerous awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award by Garden Media Guild.
Donna Kurtz
“Famous Friends of Rousham write about its unique importance for landscape and garden design. I write about its less well-known and profoundly influential introduction of the most celebrated ancient Greek and Roman sculptures into a British garden. The original statues on the continent had been seen only by the few who made a Grand Tour. Visitors to Rousham could see exact copies made from plaster casts and embraced by nature. The aesthetic appeal of placing these silent champions of cultural heritage in a landscaped garden was immediately recognised and widely copied. For nearly 300 years Rousham’s gardens have given a sense of joy and well being. Future generations would not thank us for allowing the tranquility of this idyllic place to be compromised.”
Donna Kurtz is Emeritus Professor of Classical Art in the University of Oxford. In The Reception of Classical Art in Britain (2000) she highlighted Rousham’s unique contribution to garden design.
Tania Compton
“Kent’s masterpiece at Rousham is one of so few places left of unspoilt and generationally sacred landscape heritage. To blight its panorama with housing would be like the French state sanctioning the Louvre jewellery heist. Once broken up and blighted it will be impossible to return this internationally significant prospect to its current coherence and cultural importance.”
Author of ‘Dream Gardens’ with Andrew Lawson and The Private Gardens of England, Tania is a garden designer, writer, aficionado of natural dyeing and contributing Garden Editor to The World of Interiors. She helps steer the programming committee as a Trustee of the Garden Museum. With her husband the botanist Dr. Jamie Compton she is absorbed in the embellishment a series of streamside Wiltshire meadows into an intriguing mixture of formality and wildness.
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
“Rousham is an extraordinary early c18th artistic ensemble: perched on a crescent-shaped escarpment that rises above the river Cherwell, this wonderland of groves, statues, streams, glades, porticoes, and cascades is a playful ‘anthology of Italian reminiscences’. Here William Kent metamorphosed Charles Bridgeman’s earlier geometrical garden into an ingenious garden theatre – here we perceive a patch of Oxfordshire countryside through the lens of an improver who sought to fuse the classical imagery of the Roman Campagna with imagery that is ‘local, indigenous, British’. Vaunted at the time as ‘Daphne in little’, Rousham still reigns supreme among early British landscape gardens, and remains an outstanding living testament to the bold and imaginative eclecticism that has over the centuries enriched the English landscape.“
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect and historian. He is Gardens Adviser to Historic Royal Palaces (with responsibilities at five Royal Palaces in Greater London), President of the London Gardens Trust, and lecturer at New York University (London). He is the author of several books including The Gardens and Parks at Hampton Court Palace (2005), The London Square (2012), English Garden Eccentrics (2022), andLost Gardens of London (2024).
Lawrence Wright
“Rousham can easily be described as one of the most fundamental of the English designed landscapes, a scene of historical national importance, as well as a triumph of the English arts. The gardens must be protected from any alteration that might in any way damage a vision that was set out by their creator, William Kent. I stand opposed to any such cultural, historical and environmental damage, which would be heartbreaking and also morally wrong when alternative areas that do not cause such damage can be considered.”
Lawrence Wright is the Head Gardener at Newby Hall, Yorkshire, where he is responsible for its 40-acre gardens. He studied horticulture at Brooksby Melton College in Leicestershire and was a HBGBS (Historic and Botanic Garden Bursary Scheme) trainee at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. He won the Chartered Institute of Horticulture’s Young Horticulturist of the Year in May 2016 and later graduated from the RHS Wisley trainee scheme before working at Tregothnan as a horticulturist. In 2025, Lawrence Wright and Newby Hall won a prestigious gold medal at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show for a North Yorkshire-inspired plant display.
David Lambert
“Of all the great English landscape gardens – think of Stowe, Castle Howard, Stourhead – it is Rousham which best exemplifies the genius of the English landscape garden. It is the place where William Kent ‘leapt the fence’, as Horace Walpole put it, and made an idyllic landscape of the countryside beyond. And it embodies too the picture-making imagination of the eighteenth-century, with its exquisite theatrical scenes peopled by statuary designed to evoke not only the heroism of warfare – the garden was made for a general – but also the delights of Venus and Bacchus.
And it stands too as the most authentic of all those great gardens: un-commodified and un-branded; even, dare I say, un-restored, embodying as it does only centuries of modest care-taking by generations of the owners. For those lucky enough to find it – ‘Rousham Only’ says the sign – and brave its slightly daunting casualness, it offers an unforgettable experience, unmediated by intrusive interpretation or the distractions of the heritage industry.”
David Lambert, MA IHBC FRSA, is a garden historian and campaigner and director of the Parks Agency. For many years he was conservation officer for the Garden History Society, and later an adviser and monitor for the Heritage Lottery Fund’s urban parks programme. He has been an adviser to three Parliamentary select committee inquiries and has served on expert panels for the National Trust, English Heritage and Historic Royal Palaces. A former research fellow at York and De Montfort universities he has lectured and written widely.
John Phibbs
“Rousham is the single intact work of the first of the giants of the English Landscape Movement, which sought in the 18th century to find a closer relationship between man and nature. It is a garden for our time. Kent and Bridgeman’s garden can be read as an amphitheatre, the countryside beyond is the stage and Nature is performing on it. It is an education in brave design. Nowhere else can we see at a glance the successful reversal of the principles of 17th century French and Dutch gardening. Few revolutions have been less painless and more joyful. Rousham is all the more precious because for generations one family has kept it going. Through war and epidemic, drought and flood, in good times and in bad. An Astonishing Achievement! It is a ‘must see’ for any visitor who is curious about this country.“
John Phibbs MBE is a garden historian, and author of ‘Capability Brown: Designing the English Landscape’, ‘Place-making: The art of Capability Brown’ and ‘Humphrey Repton: Designing the Landscape Garden’.
Dr. Anya Lucas
“Rousham is one of the supreme achievements of English landscape design. Its genius lies not only in the internal visual delight of its terraces and temples, but also in the unspoilt rural setting that frames every view towards the River Cherwell and beyond. To compromise that setting with intrusive development would let daylight in upon magic; it would unravel the coherence of a masterpiece which has been left virtually untouched since William Kent completed work in 1741. The Georgian Group urges a more enlightened approach and proper protection of Rousham’s surroundings: once the tranquility and visual integrity of this landscape is lost, it will be lost forever.”
Dr. Anya Lucas is Director of The Georgian Group.
The Georgian Group is an English and Welsh conservation organisation created to campaign for the preservation of historic buildings and planned landscapes of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Rita Konig
“Rousham is a very special place – it is unusual to visit a garden that is open to the public and feel so utterly transported to another century. It has a very light touch in terms of commercial presence – it is a magical slice of the English landscape, as intended by William Kent.“
Rita Konig has worked as an interior designer and design journalist for over 20 years in both the UK and in the US, regularly included within Architectural Digest’s annual AD100 as well as ELLE Decor’s prestigious A-List, both of which recognises the best in global design talent. Most recently Rita has been honoured to receive the Condé Nast House & Garden Designer of the Year Award for 2024.
A. N. Wilson
“I was first taken to Rousham by Rachel Trickett, the great eighteenth century scholar (author ofThe Honest Muse, a study of Augustan Poetry) and her friend Lord David Cecil, himself a figure who seemed to have stepped from the age of Alexander Pope. It opened my eyes to the aesthetic of the eighteenth century, and to the meaning of the Garden in the Augustan vision . I suppose I must have visited the place since a hundred times, each time with rapture. As the garden historians will all have avowed, it is not only a place of distinctive and extraordinary beauty, it is also a place which influenced garden design all over Europe. When I first read Goethe’s Elective Affinities, the conversations about how to re-arrange and lay out the estate of the young married couple immediately brought the wonder of Rousham to my mind. The very thought of its atmosphere and peculiar magic being destroyed by a housing development is vandalism of the most wicked. This must be stopped.”
A. N. Wilson is an English writer and newspaper columnist known for his critical biographies, novels and works of popular history. He is an occasional columnist for the Daily Mail and a former columnist for the London Evening Standard. He has been an occasional contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, The Spectator and The Observer.
Will Gompertz
“Rousham is one of the most enchanting and important English landscape gardens in the country, designed with enormous sensitivity and imagination by the great 18th Century landscape architect, Wiliam Kent. I have the fondest memories of walking in and around the gardens when we moved from London to a village a few hundred metres from Rousham’s arcadian splendour. It became part of our everyday life, the place where we found joy and peace. The idea that its beauty might be compromised for future generations is unbelievably sad.”
Will Gompertz is an English journalist, author and art critic. He was formerly the BBC’s arts editor before moving to a position as the Barbican Centre’s Artistic Director. He is currently Director of London’s Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Michael Van Valkenburgh
“In the summer of 1972, I was an intern at the London office of Dame Sylvia Crowe. My workmates were eager to guide me on weekends through the full history of British gardens, and of course a visit to Rousham came early in the summer. It is known as one of the first gardens of the Naturalistic period of English landscape design. Yet it is more powerful and more compelling than other landscapes of its era. At the same time, it is extraordinarily relaxed and soft—especially given the intimacy of its scale. Rousham’s masterful simplicity influenced me greatly then, and it continues to inform my work today. I strongly urge that this intact masterpiece receive every possible measure to ensure its preservation, including careful protection of the critically important borrowed landscape that surrounds it.”
Michael Van Valkenburgh is Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture, Emeritus, at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). He has taught at the GSD since 1982, served as programme director from 1987 to 1989, and chairman of the department from 1991 to 1996. He is founding principal of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., with offices in New York City and Cambridge, MA.
In 2003 Michael was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Environmental Design, and in 2010 he became the second landscape architect in history to receive the Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for contributions to architecture as an art. In 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, where he is one of only three landscape architects on its roster of members. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the American Society of Landscape Architects.
Stephen Parker
“Rousham is significant! It is the final extant English Landscape Garden that stands unaltered: and certainly the last remaining as envisioned by its creators Charles Bridgeman and William Kent, almost three hundred years ago .
Rousham is important not only for its internal features but the external broader country that sets the garden within its location, its ‘stage’ if you like: for it was William Kent who was so famously described by Horace Walpole as having “leaped the fence, and saw that all nature was a garden”. They were seeking a closer relationship between man and nature and surely a theme that resonates with us today!
The Augustan landscape of Rousham offers many journeys, many routes to be taken. But they begin from the house with a view across the bowling green, past the Peter Scheemaker sculpture of ‘A Lion Attacking a Horse’ and across over the verdant Oxfordshire countryside to a triumphal arch in the distance.
Further around Rousham, we encounter the seven arched Praeneste arcade designed to present the broad view over the River Cherwell, the Heyford Bridge and the countryside below. Again Walpole can be quoted when he describes Kent’s work in terms of “the delicious contrast of hill and valley,” and how he “tasted the beauty of the gentle swell, or concave scoop”.
Both these views illustrate the picture-making vision of Rousham’s creators: a vision that will be irrevocably damaged, indeed vandalised by this development!
To sever Rousham from its picturesque setting would be to destroy the landscape that is the garden itself! Rousham defines Englishness and the English Landscape: it presents us with an England that is a bucolic, verdant and pastoral vision. An Arcadia that helps us recognise and define our heritage both consciously and subconsciously!
This insensitive and unnecessary development will forever damage, compromise and cause irreparable harm to Rousham and deny its many pleasures for future generations!”
Stephen Parker is a garden historian, a writer and the author of ‘Englands Gardens. A Modern History’ in which Rousham is featured as a Case Study. He is lecturer in Garden and Landscape History at Cardiff University, and has written for The Garden and The Sunday Telegraph and is currently writing for Gardens Illustrated Magazine. He gives talks both nationally and internationally on both Garden History and The History of Architecture and Design.
Pippa Greenwood
“My working life has centred around horticulture and gardening. I was lucky enough to be brought up with a garden and never to have lived without one – why so lucky? Because plants and gardens bring pure pleasure and happiness, their positive impact on mental and physical wellbeing is now officially documented too. Rousham Gardens are not only one of my favourites, but also very well-loved by so many – gardeners and non-gardeners. Garden-owners love to visit it, and for those who don’t have their own green space, it is maybe even more special, even more essential. The gardens bring almost instant pleasure, and a sense of tranquillity and restorative calm which lasts considerably longer than the visit itself.
Rousham Gardens may indeed be a classic example of English garden design, but they are also a truly relaxed, green haven open to the public throughout the year. They’re very much there for visitors from the UK and indeed across the world, even for educational visits and are seen as a great masterpiece of design and part of the UK’s heritage. But that is ‘just’ the official side of it. As they are now, they are there for us all to absorb the unique calm and magic of the place, their charm and restorative qualities. Create a very sizeable development so close, and much of that magic will be lost, and it will be a loss felt my so many (most of whom are currently unaware of the proposals). Please, please don’t let it happen…. Rousham Gardens are something special, something we should value and protect, wherever we live.”
Pippa Greenwood is a botanist and plant pathologist as well as a television and radio presenter. She appears frequently on the BBC’s long-running Gardener’s World television programme and has been a regular panellist on Gardener’s Question Time on BBC Radio 4. She was also for many years the gardening columnist for The Mirror newspaper and has written many books on gardening including ‘The New Gardener’ and ‘The Gardener’s Year’. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Durham University in 2007 for her work in gardening and its science. She has also been elected onto the RHS Science Committee and is a Garden Advisor for the RHS Garden, Wisley.
James Fox
“For landscape architecture students, and sometimes landscape architects or architects, Rousham is the first place I suggest to go to learn about the art of landscape. Everything is here: The lie of the land, exaggerated by the forms of the planting; play of light on water; cinematic moments; dynamic contrasts of light and shade; tension, narrative, history, and strange collisions of use. Most significantly the garden is always presented in relation to its surroundings, a pastoral landscape animated by the road, the bridge, the mill, passersby, and the mostly bovine populace of the water meadows and fields beyond. At Rousham one’s eye becomes a roving lens, constantly drawn onwards to the next scene, never disappointed. Walpole called it Kentissime, meaning that it is the best work of the designer William Kent. I think of it as simply the best.“
James Fox has taught landscape architecture at Kingston University, Greenwich University, and continues to teach on the MA in Historical and Sustainable Architecture at NYU together with Todd Longstaffe-Gowan and Clay Baylor. He is a partner in the landscape architecture Practice FFLO.
Andrew Duff
“Rousham sits at the heart of my teaching because it captures the essence of what meaningful garden and landscape design should achieve. It is more than a historic site, it is a lesson in rhythm, restraint and spatial sensitivity. Rather than presenting a single scene, Rousham invites a journey. Views are not imposed but revealed, guiding movement gently while cultivating anticipation and reflection. Every turn feels deliberate yet effortless, demonstrating how the atmosphere can be shaped through subtle spatial cues rather than decoration. I encourage students to experience Rousham as a sequence of conversations, between land and architecture, planting and topography, openness and enclosure.
Rousham remains one of the purest examples of early landscape gardening. Kent abandoned rigid formality, instead embracing suggestion and natural topography. The garden shows how restraint can be more powerful than excess. Pathways, shifts in height, and filtered views demonstrate how a designer can edit rather than impose. For me, its greatest lesson is that space can think for itself, that good design listens before it speaks“
Andrew is a British garden designer and educationalist. His work is known for its quiet naturalism, creating a dialogue between house, garden and the wider landscape. He has designed gardens of all scales across the UK and internationally and is Chairman of the Board at the Inchbald School of Design and Chairman of The Society of Garden & Landscape Designers.
Tim Richardson
“Rousham is a vanishingly rare example of an English landscape garden which has somehow retained an atmosphere which feels almost unchanged since the early 18th century. This is largely to do with the fact that it is still in the hands of the descendants of James Dormer, the man who commissioned it, and it has not been altered or disfigured by unnecessary signage and amenities. The garden has long been celebrated for its stubborn refusal to commercialise — there is no shop or cafe, and for many years there was only an honesty box for entrance fees. The resulting atmosphere within the garden has to be experienced to be believed. But this is a delicate survival, which would certainly be adversely affected by modern encroachments. The great architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner stated that the English landscape garden is — alongside Gothic cathedrals — Britain’s greatest contribution to the visual arts. And this is arguably the most authentic survival. What are we thinking?“
Tim Richardson is an arts historian and critic who has made a specialism of the English landscape garden. His 26th book is The English Landscape Garden: Dreaming of Arcadia (2025), the first fully illustrated history of the genre. He has taught at London and Vienna universities and is the author of Oxford University’s online course on the history of English landscapes and gardens. He was formerly gardens editor of Country Life and has been a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazine.
Tricia Guild
“Rousham is unique and a lasting testament to William Kent’s extraordinary vision. For over three hundred years, it has inspired and delighted visitors in equal measure and is without doubt, of vital cultural significance. It is so important that we continue to guard and nurture this special place and imperative that this iconic place is preserved and above all, protected.”
Patricia Guild OBE is a British designer and the founder and Creative Director of Designers Guild. She is known for her fabric and wallpaper collections and her work as a designer and manufacturer on a range of home interior products. She was awarded an OBE for services to interior design in 2008.
Clive Nichols
“I have been visiting Rousham, William Kent’s 18th century masterpiece, on and off for the past 25 years. The landscape remains almost exactly as it was intended and the garden sits in total harmony and peace with the countryside beyond. It is laid out like a series of perfect stage sets – to damage these views would be akin to building a housing estate next to Stonehenge. We must not allow one of our most precious landscape gardens to be ruined by modern development.”
Clive Nichols is one of the Uk’s leading horticultural photographers. He has spnt the past 40 years photographing gardens all over the world for books, magazines and private clients. He lives near to Rousham in the village of Wardington, near Banbury.
Oliver Gerrish
“Rousham is an example of land stewardship over the centuries by one family. In caring for a place at the heart of the history of landscape design, the Rousham estate has given us all the chance to learn about a time when beauty and its beneficial effects were of the utmost importance. William Kent’s Rousham is a miniature classical world, which borrows views from the landscape around it to create a feeling of infinite space and tranquility. The delicate and meandering curves of the Cherwell and the man-made elements of the Georgian landscape work perfectly together, and utterly delight and entrance anyone who visits. Rousham is one of our ‘lungs’, which is what I like to call the places that let us breathe and decompress. Its message is clear and ageless; when we work with nature in all its glory, and add to it our own carefully-planned ideas, we create an image of paradise on earth. Rousham is not just a beautiful place, but also the rarest survival of a 1740s garden and borrowed landscape. That there are plans to irrevocably change the delicate ecosystem of this place is hard to imagine, and they must be stopped. Who are we to deny future generations of the privilege of Rousham, and its hallowed place in the history of landscape design?”
Oliver Gerrish, MSt, is an architectural historian who studied at the University of Cambridge. He is a trustee of the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust as well as founder of their Architecture Awards. Oliver has written for Country Life, appeared in a number of BBC and ITV television series on architecture, and organised and led numerous tours to many of Britain’s historical buildings.
Dr Patrick Eyres
“On my first visit to Rousham, forty-five years ago, I became enchanted by the exquisite Arcady created by the ingenuity of William Kent.
Rousham survived the Cold War, which brought American warplanes to Upper Heyford. Strangely, the Hercules transporters that soared above the triumphal arch, which commemorated General Dormer’s active service, and the silhouette of an F-111 fighter-bomber parked on the horizon, appeared to be complementary eyecatchers.
Through a chance encounter in the garden, during the late 1980s, I heard an extraordinary and prescient story. The narrator lamented the catastrophic release of mink from a mink farm. These semiaquatic predators had rampaged along the Cherwell, killing all before them – fish, fowl and small animals. Habitats were laid waste. Yet, five years later, the narrator was relieved to note signs of regeneration.
Unlike resilient nature, the encroachment of a new town’s housing and commuter infrastructure into the Cherwell Valley would be irreversible. Challenged to fashion a garden out of a swathe of riverside land deemed unsuitable for farming, Kent’s landscape garden also encompassed the valley beyond. His achievement was a triumph of eighteenth-century design. Surely the responsibility of new town development is to challenge twenty-first century design to guarantee continuity of the historic and fragile symbiosis between Rousham and the Cherwell Valley?”
Dr Patrick Eyres has, since 1981, created fifty-six editions of the New Arcadian Journal, which brings artists and writers together to explore designed landscapes. He has published extensively in other books and journals, and lectured in the UK, USA and Europe. He taught at the School of Art and Design, Bradford College, and has served on the boards of the Garden History Society (now the Gardens Trust), the Wentworth Castle Heritage Trust and the Little Sparta Trust. He now endeavours to protect a small garden in Wharfedale, known as The Stone Garden.
Plum Sykes
“Rousham is one of the most exquisite gardens that is open to the public that I have ever experienced. It is a haven of beauty and peace, where visitors can wander for hours, take a picnic, and there are no commercial distractions like gift shops or restaurants to ruin the incredible tranquility. I first visited during lockdown and have been back every summer since, sometimes with friends, sometimes just to roam alone. A huge development on the doorstep would destroy this paradise forever, one of the great feats of landscape design and architecture, and I hope that the campaign to prevent this will be successful.”
Plum Sykes is an author and writer for Vogue.
Alan Bennett
“I saw Rousham first in the rain, with no one else there but two Japanese on their honeymoon.
It’s always been quiet, an undiscovered place – known to my partner but not to me – which makes
the threat to it now all the more poignant.
It shouldn’t have to be protected, neglect its best preservative. The interior of the dovecote is precious, the yew tree thicket, the rill. Even to conserve it is to destroy it.
I had never heard of William Kent when I first came here and I found the architecture of the house extravagant. But it grew on me and not merely the view across the valley and the bridge. Here was something so special it went straight to the heart.
One of the few honours I have accepted, almost as a joke, is the Freedom of Rousham, an honour that has no privilege except the entry in Who’s Who. I despair of the planners making the right decision which is to leave it alone. Don’t let anybody touch it or anything overshadow it. There is little enough left of William Kent. Let it be.”
Alan Bennett is a playwright and author.
Rupert Thomas
“Great Art is for everyone and its preservation is a moral duty. So why are we faced with the despoilment of a creation as internationally important as Rousham?
Export embargoes are slapped on culturally significant works of art. Yet this sublime house and landscape garden is threatened by the home-grown danger of a third-rate development of no architectural merit which is entirely out of scale with its surroundings. It is in serious danger.
We have been here before and will be again and again. Quite rightly: lack of housing is a national shame. But building the wrong new thing in the wrong old place serves only the developers who see ruination as their right.
Rousham is as fragile as it is precious. Its beauty and restorative solitude should be protected for visitors as yet unborn. There are more ingenious and elegant answers to providing homes. But there is and only ever can be one Rousham. It must not be compromised.”
Rupert Thomas was Editor of The World of Interiors 2000-2022, and Director, Dennis Severs’ House 2023-present.
Christopher Woodward
“In 1750 Clary, the Head Gardener at Rousham, described the view from the terrace across the Cherwell to the spires and hills beyond as ‘The prettiest view in the whole world’. It should never change.
Rousham is as great an English work of art as The Wilton Diptych, or Britten’s ‘War Requiem’.
The series of letters exchanged between the client General Dormer, the designer William Kent, and the team on site in the period 1738 – 41 show that the making of the garden was inseparable from the experience of the wider, idealised landscape. The dying General was driven to Heyford Bridge to view the plantings of trees; the statue of Antinous was positioned with that same view in mind; the mill was re-modelled to be Picturesque.
The idea that a landscape can be a thing of beauty flows from the 18th-century which explains our National Parks, our view from Richmond Hill, a million Sunday walks.
Sure, we need houses. But some things are sacred.”
Christopher Woodward is the Director of the Garden Museum.
Timothy Mowl
“Rousham, perhaps the most beautiful, the most intellectual and certainly the most atmospheric garden in this country, remains resolutely individual…At no point can the gardens be seen in their entirety, as in a formal layout that can be taken in at a glance. Kent’s designs are brilliantly interactive. A visitor must move through them, coming suddenly across surprise statuary, a garden building or an expansive view all conjured, in Walpole’s phrase, ‘from the pencil of his imagination.“
Timothy Mowl is an architectural and landscape historian. He is Emeritus Professor of History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes at the University of Bristol, and Honorary Professor at the Royal Agricultural University, Cirencester. He is also Director of AHC Consultants. He was awarded the Hawksmoor Medal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1987, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1993, and served as a member of Council of the Garden History Society between 2002 and 2007. He is currently President of the Avon & Gloucestershire Gardens Trust. He has published 14 books in the Historic Gardens of England series.
Ursula Buchan
“The particular fascination and charm, above all other early eighteenth-century landscapes, of Rousham for me is that it is in a very rural situation and has not changed since 1741. It is still faithful to William Kent’s vision and his finest garden. It was of William Kent, a painter and theatre designer as well as landscape artist, that Horace Walpole famously said that ‘he leapt the fence and saw that all nature was a garden’. He brought the countryside into the garden by framing views and providing eyecatchers. That will be utterly destroyed if the Heyford Park development goes ahead. Rousham is very precious, because it has survived so many changes in society and taste. For nearly three hundred years, it has given great pleasure to visitors, who delight in the fine garden buildings, the pools, cascades, winding rivulets and secret woodland walks. Rousham is an exemplar of a world-famous creative movement, the English Landscape Garden, and its undermining would be a tragedy.”
Ursula Buchan is a trained gardener and gardening writer. She is author of a number of books, including the much-acclaimed The English Garden, which was a collaboration with the photographer, Andrew Lawson.
Prof. Joe Mordaunt Crook
“In the catalogue of English landscape gardens, Rousham is a precious name. There, in a largely unspoilt setting, in 1738-41, it was William Kent (1685-1748) who – as much as anyone – created the informal landscaping traditions of England. In Horace Walpole’s immortal words, Kent first ‘leaped the fence (known as a Ha Ha) and saw that all nature was a garden’. or as Sir Howard Colvin more recently put it, Kent ‘combined the formality of Palladian architecture with the studied informality of the surrounding park… a series of three-dimensional pictures comparable to the ideal compositions of Albano or Poussin’. Today the church bells of Rousham still ring out across a largely unspoilt setting. Long may this lovely setting – and the setting is everything – survive for visitors – strollers and farmers alike.”
Professor Mordaunt Crook CBE FBA FSA is a British architectural historian, specializing in the Georgian and Victorian eras, and a former Slade Professor of Fine Art and Waynflete Lecturer at the University of Oxford. He is an Emeritus Professor at the University of London and an Honorary Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the British Academy.
Sarah Raven
“Rousham is one of the most important gardens ever made, and probably the first to understand that the relationship between a garden and its surroundings is at the core of what it means. That is why here, above all, real care needs to be taken with those surroundings. To blanket Rousham with building developments would be to kill off everything that is most beautiful about it.”
Sarah Raven is an English gardener, cook, writer, broadcaster and entrepreneur.
Revd. Prof. Martin Henig
“The landscape of Rousham surrounds and encapsulates the most important surviving eighteenth century Picturesque garden, arguably the very height of English landscape design, created by Charles Bridgeman and especially William Kent. In it the Romantic landscape of Claude and British imitators such as Richard Wilson is realised. This is the sort of landscape, managed but with an elegant lack of regularity which appealed to the greatest figures of the Augustan Age such as Alexander Pope. The rarity of this landscape, its historic interest and stunning beauty- if it were a painting would be worth billions. I would, in all seriousness, compare its importance to the Sistine Chapel. If any element is disfigured or destroyed we would have lost one of the very greatest parts of our heritage.
A great deal of thought and effort has been put in to preserving and enhancing the Stonehenge landscape, rightly both for its prehistoric importance but because the same order and disorder was admired and became part of our artistic heritage at the same time that the Rousham landscape was created. The Rousham Landscape should be accorded the same status.”
Revd. Professor Martin Henig is an Anglican Priest in Oxford diocese and an Art Historian working mainly on Classical Art which he taught for many years at Oxford University prior to Ordination. He was a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College 1997-2009 and is still a member of the common room there. He is also a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and was for many years editor of the Journal of the British Archaeological Association. He is also Vice President of the Anglican Society for the Welfare of Animals.
Frederick Hervey Bathurst
“Rousham is famed for Kent’s weaving network of serpentining paths about the garden’s wooded hillside, which tease the visitor with views that seem to dissolve as quickly as they are made. However, these subtle shades should be understood as a counterpoint to the all-encompassing view from Scheemakers’ ‘Lion and Horse’ statue which stands on the limit of the Bowling Green’s broad expanse. Here, before the house, all the instruments of Kent’s orchestra combine in a true pastoral symphony. McClary illustrates it vividly:
‘…prehaps at this time you have the prettiest view in the whole World, … you see from hence five pretty Country Villages, and the Grand Triumphant Arch…, together with the naturial turnings of the Hills, to let that charming River downe to butify our Gardens, and what stops our Long view is a very pretty Corn Mill, Built in the Gothick manner but nothing sure can please the Eye like our Short View, there is a fine Meadow, cut off from the garden only by the River Charvell whereon is all sorts of Cattle feeding, which looks the same as if they was feeding in the Garden’.
That this view has remained largely unchanged in over 250 years is wondrous. That we might be the last generation to see it as such – pending the outcome of a planning application for 9,000 houses – is tremendously upsetting.“
Frederick Hervey Bathurst is a Landscape Architect, currently training at The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL). Prior to this, he studied architectural history at the universities of Edinburgh and Virginia. Frederick writes on architectural history and criticism for various publications and is Chair of the Young Georgians and a trustee of the Georgian Group.
Chris Dyson
“Rousham matters deeply to me not only as an architect, but through a personal connection formed during my time as a student at Oxford Brookes University. While studying architecture, I would often visit the gardens, returning repeatedly to walk their paths and absorb their quiet lessons. Those visits shaped my understanding of space, sequence, and atmosphere in a way no studio project quite could.
What struck me then—and continues to resonate—is the extraordinary clarity of William Kent’s vision. Rousham is not simply preserved; it is intact as a total work of art, where landscape and architecture are inseparable. The experience unfolds gently yet deliberately, each turn revealing a considered relationship between built form, nature, and time.
Its importance lies in this continuity. It has avoided over-curation, allowing age, weathering, and subtle irregularities to remain visible and meaningful. For me, Rousham is a touchstone—both intellectually and emotionally—demonstrating how design can be simultaneously controlled and natural, composed yet free.
To preserve Rousham is to safeguard not just a historic place, but a formative experience and a vital reference point for generations of architects learning to see, think, and design with greater sensitivity.”
Chris Dyson is a London-based architect and founding director of Chris Dyson Architects, an award-winning practice recognised for its thoughtful engagement with historic buildings and complex urban contexts. The studio has built a strong reputation for delivering carefully crafted projects that range from the conservation and adaptation of listed buildings to contemporary interventions within sensitive heritage settings.
Chris trained in architecture in the UK at Oxford and then Glasgow school of Art and has over two decades of professional experience. His work is characterised by a rigorous design process, close collaboration with clients and consultants, and a deep respect for the cultural significance of place. He has led numerous high-profile projects across London, including residential, commercial, and cultural schemes, many of which involve working within conservation areas and with protected structures.
Alongside practice, Chris is actively engaged in the architectural community, contributing to discourse around heritage, sustainability, and the evolving role of architecture in historic cities. His work has been widely published and recognised for its clarity, restraint, and enduring quality.
Chris Dyson Architects continues to pursue projects that bridge past and present, demonstrating how architecture can sensitively extend the life and meaning of existing buildings.