PUBLIC PLACES
“A day away from Chartwell is a day wasted”. That’s what Sir Winston Churchill said about his family home near Westerham in Kent, which has been in the care of the National Trust since his death in 1965. Neville Johnson went there to learn why its gardens and grounds are just as treasured as the house itself.
R
oughly thirty acres of formal gardens, and about forty acres of woodland and pasture beyond, are spread out to the south and east of a house
indelibly linked to our darkest and most glorious passages in history. It’s a great sight on a late autumn morning. As winter beckons, there is still a wonderful pallet of colour wherever you look.
Churchill bought Chartwell in 1922 and, years later, said he did so for the view over the Weald of Kent, which remains largely the same after nearly a century. The real beauty of outdoor Chartwell is that the formal abuts naturally and very openly to managed countryside with magnificent vistas. It always did. The National Trust’s Tim Parker, Gardens and Countryside Manager here and at two other Trust properties in the area, has the job of keeping it so. I’m invited into the National Trust offices in the house to talk to Tim about the gardens and grounds at Chartwell and the work that goes on here. He tells me that the Trust has actually now owned Chartwell longer than the Churchills did. Its heritage is taken very seriously. “The ultimate aim we have for grounds care at Chartwell is to present the gardens and the wider estate as the Churchills would have known it,” he said. “What we try to do is keep alive the image of it being a home outside as much as inside the house.”
Always a place for outdoor family enjoyment
The balance between being authentic and yet sympathetic to the needs and pressures of maintaining a much-visited National Trust attraction is a constant challenge. Getting on for a quarter of a million people came to Chartwell last year and the aim is to get that up to at least 260,000 in the next twelve months. “Visitor numbers do drop a little after the House is closed each November for the winter months, but we are putting a big effort into enhancing interest in Chartwell’s outdoor beauty as well so that the flow of visitors keeps on growing all year round,”
PC December/January 2020 111
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