The Walled Garden in the grounds of Osborne, at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, was a remnant of the earlier estate on this land, the former house's kitchen garden. Even the rather grand entrance was originally the porch of the old house, spared during the demolition and cleverly inserted here instead. But it was Thomas Cubitt, working with Prince Albert on the buildings of the new house, who smartened up the wall: he had them heightened, adding stucco to the old brick buttresses to make them look like pilasters, rusticating them and adding smart ball finials above a new stepped and dentilled ledge (see Lloyd and Pevsner 213).
The glasshouses, however, were entirely new: "erected in 1854 by Thomas Clark and Co of Birmingham" (Turner 28), designed like the ones Prince Albert had recently had built at the Frogmore estate at Windsor. These Gothic structures with their fitments for adjusting the airflow have been restored, though the boilers needed to be replaced.
Text and photographs by Jacqueline Banerjee. Special thanks to English Heritage for permitting photography at Osborne, and for allowing the photographs to be shared on a non-commercial basis. You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL or cite it in a print document. [Click on all the images to enlarge them.]
Related Material
Bibliography
Lloyd, David W., and Nikolaus Pevsner. Isle of Wight. Buildings of England series. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006.
"Osborne, Isle of Wight, England." Parks and Gardens, UK. Web. 16 September 2017.
Turner, Michael. Osborne. Rev. reprint. London: English Heritage, 2016.
Created 16 September 2017