Landscape record 1232001000 - Stoke Court

Present house rebuilt after fire in 1979. Water features beyond the boundary survive from the older parkland? There is an oak lined walk known to have been in existence by 1719. The second edition 6" OS map shows the house at the eastern side of a large block of parkland with landscaped informal gardens and wooded boundaries. Evidence for formal gardens next to the house, also four ornamental lakes in parkland. Modern APs show residential development across most of the landscaped informal gardens. Formal gardens have been destroyed by house extention. Parkland is now used as a golf course (B3).
A pleasure ground laid out informally in the late C18 or early C19, as the setting for a rural cottage closely associated with the poet Thomas Gray. The owners sought to create a small‐scale imitation of a landscape park in the style of a ferme ornee, imitating a working farm with a circuit walk through a belt of ornamental trees and hedgerows around a paddock, with views over Windsor and Eton from the upper levels that possibly inspired Gray’s poem ‘Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College'. This layout was developed in several phases in the mid‐ and late C19 and early C20, to include formal features, a maze, a chain of water bodies and parkland. The most important designed elements, those present by the mid‐C19, largely survive. The later C19 and early C20 expansion phases to the south, west and east, were of lesser importance and have been lost or fragmented. The C20 housing around the garden has damaged the early C20 phase particularly to the south‐west and south‐east. See report for detail (B4).