A Rare Survival
“Miles of flint and good oak fencing, an estate saw mill, a deer park, a lake, then a well-conditioned red-brick model Victorian village with a Georgian house (probably for the agent), a stone rectory by P C Hardwick in mid-Victorian Tudor, a school, a big walled garden with acres of glass, a well-kept drive swirling past exotic firs and rhododendrons to a spired church, and finally an enormous stone house... All this has the overwhelming and firmly established atmosphere of the great country house of Trollope’s novels, which continued into good King Edward’s reign. It is the last of its kind in the county and worth seeing as a compact, well-run example of benevolent private ownership...”.
So John Betjeman and John Piper described Englefield in Murray’s Berkshire Architectural Guide of 1949 and the association with Trollope is well-founded because the Englefield that Betjeman saw was exactly contemporary with Trollope’s Barsetshire. It had only really come into being from the middle of the 19th century and in 1949 had changed very little since 1892, nor has it changed markedly since.
If Englefield was a rare survival in the middle of the 20th century, how much rarer is it in the 21st, still an intact and functioning estate village with its school, its church, its shop, and the great house still lived in by the Squire. There is no safari park and no swarm of visitors trooping round a house frozen as a snapshot in time or curated to emphasise a particular modern view of history. It is true that the post office service was withdrawn from the village in 2008, the church, school and shop with its tea room all draw a large proportion of their support from outside the village, the former Workmen’s Club has become a village hall and most of the big walled garden is now a commercial operation; but never mind, it endures.
The powerful attraction to many people from outside the village means that it is busier today than at any time in the last 150 years, not always entirely to the liking of those born and bred there and something that would have been unheard of, discouraged even, within living memory. Nevertheless, it occupies a relatively isolated rural location free from through-traffic and profligate development. In the 21st century few such places still exist and are to be cherished where they are found.
Leslie North writing in the Reading Chronicle of August 1980 described his approach to the village: “…I felt – if not exactly unreal – as if stepping into something retreated from an unacceptable present.”. He was right, for “retreated” is what Englefield literally is, thanks to the new roads built by the 19th century owners. At just the right time these allowed Englefield to become the backwater it is today and prevented it from being on what would undoubtedly have become a fairly major cross-roads.
For all that, Englefield has not stood still, preserved in aspic, as are some of the more famous “chocolate-box” tourist attractions. Model village it may be: but it is a working model, an estate with the village its active centre providing jobs, houses and an orderly social structure. By way of contrast one needs only to consider the similar estate and village of nearby Nuneham Courtney in Oxfordshire: here too was a gentleman’s country estate where, like Englefield, the village was moved to create a park around the owner’s house. But the new Nuneham Courtney village was laid out along what became the main road to Oxford (now the A4074) and the house was later sold. It is now owned by Oxford University and is operated commercially as a “global retreat”.
Nuneham Courtney is believed to have been the stimulus for Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village of 1770, fiercely critical of the wholesale removal of villages to create landscaped parks from productive agricultural land with its well-known couplet:
“Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay.”
This is certainly a political statement and ignores the fact that the old houses would have been ramshackle affairs, perhaps of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, and they were replaced with better dwellings of brick and tile.
Englefield has its origin as a Saxon (or earlier) hamlet and has survived by being continually, but sensitively, renewed. Most of what is seen today goes no further back than the 19th century with one or two bits from the 18th; even Englefield House and St Mark’s church, although of Elizabethan and Norman origin respectively, owe their present appearance to Victorian reconstruction. New housing has been built in the late 20th and early 21st century, but of an appropriate scale and design and tastefully blended into what was there before. Betjeman, who in his chapter on Berkshire in The English Counties Illustrated (1948), was appalled by “...the council houses which mutilate almost every village...[that] are generally considered to be amongst the most ill-sited, disproportioned, inharmonious and badly built houses in England [and] provide a glaring contrast with their surroundings” would surely have found nothing here to criticise.
© 2023 Richard J Smith