Exciting news!

 After a lot of toing and froing, checking safety equipment, scaffold planks and consulting with Jason and our build team onsite, we have a very exciting announcement. We are offering people the chance to climb up the scaffolding tower and view the restoration of Betley Court for themselves.

Photo: The scaffolding floor was dismantled from this section of the house, allowing us to peer into the rooms again. This was the first floor bedroom in Caroe Corner, and it is beginning to look like a room again!

It’s quite an historic moment of the restoration, as the wall rebuild advances. Soon the walls will be sufficiently refurbished to allow the reroofing to begin. At that point, the view into the house will be covered over, and sights like John Nash’s ‘iron-arch’ will be encased in bricks, and hidden from view once more.

John Nash's 'iron-arch' is begining to disappear behind new brickwork

Once they’re appropriately dressed in hard hat and hi-viz jacket, small groups of 15 will spend about 30 mins on a supervised walk around the scaffolding. Visitors will need a head for heights! Nigel will talk about how the restoration is advancing, and explain various areas of work and the challenges we’ve faced during the rebuild.

One of the scaffolding staircases - our regular climb up to the top of the site

 

I love clambering up the scaffold staircases each week, to see what our conservation builders
MCL and their master craftspeople have been up to, and I’m very excited about other people being able to see their work.

Ticket holders for the house tour will be able to visit the gardens afterwards. Unfortunately, on this occasion, the gardens will not be open to the public. Our first weekend will be 11-12th September, with a second in October TBC. Tickets for the house tour MUST be bought in advance from Eventbrite (a ticket selling app available online and on mobile phones):

TICKET INFO

We will NOT be selling tickets on the day, due to the nature of the tour, as we need to know numbers in advance. We look forward to seeing you, if you are able to come along!

You can just see the custom-made concrete lintels, top of frame, ready for installation

One of the joys of watching the build progress has been seeing how the construction team get around problems they find. This month they have been making bespoke curved concrete lintels. This involved them tracing the shape of the bow sections of brickwork onto hardboard to make a pattern, then making a mould out of exterior ply- not easy, as plywood is flat! The solution involved cutting slots into the flat sheets of ply, in parallel, on the side of wood that was to be the inside of the curve, thus allowing the wood to conform to the curve. Once the moulds were fabricated, concrete was poured and allowed to set, and then the wooden pieces removed. Voila! A perfect fitting customised lintel. Clever stuff!

The new floor joists, helping this room look more room-like again. The fire place certianly seems less inconguous now that its sitting on a floor again! 

More flooring joists are installed every time we visit Betley Court, bringing the feel of a dwelling rather than a ruin closer and closer. None of the rooms are standard, and in places, they are working around hefty wooden joist that survived the fire intact. There is a wonderful fusion of old meeting new.

The south elevation - note the aged and soot-stained original bricks to the left of photo, compared with the new repairs.

The south elevation, where the fire stated, and where some of the most catastrophic damage happened has been rebuilt up to the top of the windows. The brickwork looks very smart indeed! John Craddock would be very pleased to see his frontage reinstated!

A red sandstone lintel, inscised  to look like brick. This has been copied from the remnants of the original stone and it looks so smart!

As for the gardens this year, the autumn colours have been slow to arrive. That’s been down to the cooler, wetter August, I think. We had bumper crops of acorns and beechnuts, that crunch underfoot, when you walk around the gardens. The squirrels will have no problems fattening up for the arrival of winter.

Gladioli 'Stafford County'

The Stafford County gladioli, a glorious blousy scarlet red variety I planted some years ago – primarily because Professor Brown liked the bright spires- is putting on a bright display in the formal beds. The moody blue collection of sweet peas I raised from seed turned out not to be blue at all, but reds, pink and whites. I don’t know what happened there! Maybe a mistake at the Thompson and Morgan seed packing plant?

Sweet Pea - not Moody Blues!!!

We also have some fine almost black hollyhocks, and shocking pink coneflowers, giving little splashes of colour to the beds.

Coneflowers

Black hollyhock

They’ll stand until the frost come, although with our unpredictable weather, who knows when that will be?

All best wishes

Ladybird Su