Croome Park in Worcestershire is the largest, most complete surviving landscape designed by Capability Brown and is a Grade I registered park. Croome was hugely influential as the first example of an aesthetic that became recognised as ‘The English Style’. The National Trust owns most of the park, which has been open to the public since 1995.
The Trust has achieved remarkable progress since 1995 to restore the original design. A major element of the design is a series of key views to and from Croome Court (the House that is central to the whole property), with smaller ‘follies’ and ‘eyecatchers’ around the park. Building on work by the National Trust, LUC drew up a landscape masterplan for Croome Court in 2001, which included returning land in arable use to grazed parkland, restoring landscape features and providing a comprehensive framework for future management and restoration projects.
LUC has provided planning services to the National Trust at Croome Park since 2001. We helped the Trust to object to proposals for damaging ‘enabling’ development within the Grade II listed walled garden at Croome in 2003 and 2006.
In an exciting continuation of the Croome story, in 2008 The National Trust obtained a lease for Croome Court, the Grade I Listed mansion house at the centre of the estate. The LUC team advised on plans to open the Court to the public, extend the car park, and undertake associated landscape works. This project aimed to enhance the visitor attraction, reuniting the park and house as was intended in Capability Brown’s design, as well as helping to protect this nationally important house and park for future generations. Planning permission and listed building consent was granted in February 2009, and the Court officially opened to the public in September 2009, with visitor numbers since growing year on year.
Securing planning permission to open the Court to the public and improve visitor facilities and access involved close working with the design team and building good relationships with the local planning authority and statutory consultees. LUC drove the project forward, co-ordinating inputs to the Design and Access Statement, and submitting the applications for the Trust. We kept in close contact with the local planning authority during the determination period, negotiated conditions acceptable to the client, and prepared a staff Travel Plan.
Working alongside people with such detailed knowledge of a historic site and who care passionately about its future was inspiring. It was really rewarding to be involved over many phases of the National Trust’s plans for Croome and to see the house finally opened to the public, something that was a distant dream only a couple of years before.
