Chris Upton examines the work of the great Georgian landscape designer Humphry Repton.

They say that the great landscape gardener, Humphry Repton (1752-1818), was just as fond of the theatre as he was of gardens. Indeed, Repton spent a great deal of his spare time writing plays. It’s not such an unusual combination, when you think about it. Landscape and garden design, then as now, are about illusion and concealment, pretending and surprising.

The gardener and the playwright tell you just as much as you need to know at one given spot. Turn a corner or go back after the interval and everything looks different. Let me prove the point with an example.

By the 1780s much of Humphry Repton’s work from the great country estates to the outskirts of the town. Typically one of the nouveau riche – an industrialist as often as not – would buy an estate just far enough from the town to play the part of a country gent, and just close enough to keep an eye on his factories. Then he would call on Repton to give the place a make-over, a stage-set on which he could act out the role of landowner.

In 1791 the call came from John Taylor, who had purchased Moseley Hall with some of the proceeds of his button-making empire. From the high vantage-point of his new estate Taylor would have had a grandstand view to Birmingham itself, just a couple of miles away across the Rea Valley. John Taylor was not so snobbish as to want to forget where he came from, but he did not necessarily want to see all of it.

There were, in a sense, two views of Birmingham available. One showed the high ground around St Philip’s, grand and elegant; the other showed the smoking chimneys and workshops of the lower town. Taylor wanted the one and not the other.

Humphry Repton could do that. “The town of Birmingham,” Repton wrote, “though in some ways may be a beautiful object, must be introduced only in part, and instead of removing that ridge of hill, and the trees to the north-west, I should rather advise that a few more be placed on the lawn, as to hide more of the gaudy red houses.”

Humphry Repton’s cunning plan was even more cunning than that. Although the red-brick houses and workshops of Birmingham would be concealed behind the trees, the smoke issuing from their chimneys would give “that misty tone of colour, so much the object of landscape painters.” How clever (and theatrical) was that !

A designer as smart as this was in much demand in the West Midlands as the 18th Century gave way to the 19th.

Repton drew up plans for Himley and Hilton, Ingestre and Attingham, Great Barr and Condover and many others too. Typically Repton would charge five guineas a day, but his customers would receive a very tangible and striking indication of his schemes. Repton produced in his familiar Red Books colour images of the landscape he was set to overturn, with an overlaying transparency illustrating the changes. What could show his plans better than this ?

Only three years after his visit to Moseley, Repton was back in the Midlands, working for another industrialist. This time the commission came from Samuel Galton junior, the gun manufacturer. The Galtons already owned one country estate close to Birmingham in the shape of Great Barr Hall. Now Samuel had purchased another (for £7.300) called Warley Hall in what is now Smethwick.

What Repton would have seen on his visit was typical south Staffordshire countryside. There was a house – Warley Hall – rolling meadows (leasows) and woodland, winding tracks and a number of farms. It would take only the pen of a playwright to turn this reality into an illusion.

The first clever trick was to pretend that Samuel Galton owns the whole world. That could be done by concealing the boundaries of the estate behind trees or below the horizon to give the impression that it was boundless.

The second was to so construct the driveway (by curving it round) to make visitors believe the estate was bigger than it was. After a long and winding road they turn a corner and there was Mr Galton’s house, ready and willing to welcome. Repton did not think much of the present Warley Hall, but went no further than to suggest an appropriately neo-classical replacement.

Thirdly, there were the farmhouses. The owner would know that there was money to made from farming, but (like John Taylor) did not need to see it. And he certainly did not want to look like a farmer to his house guests.

Here again the great illusionist worked his magic. On Repton’s transparencies the farmhouses miraculously disappeared behind woodland. As for Lightwoods Farm, brazenly displaying itself in full view of the house, Repton shrewdly suggested the erection of a Doric temple on the far side of the meadow, ringed by a copse of trees. So entranced would visitors be by the sight of an ancient Greek temple that they would not notice a man shovelling manure in the far distance.

All of this survives in Humphry Repton’s Red Book. Frustratingly though, we do not know how much of his masterplan was put into operation. Some, certainly, but perhaps not all, and perhaps not for some years after both Humphry and Samuel had left for even more celestial landscapes.

Yet the tale of Warley Hall – as many ups as downs – is worth pursuing a little further, for this is one of the few Repton landscapes that all of us can be said to own.