56 CONTEXT 180 : JUNE 2024 reached a stage where action had to be taken to ensure its survival. Today, the grotto lies below Cross Deep between Radnor House independent school to the east and St Catherine’s School to the west. Access to it can be arranged through Pope’s Grotto Preservation Trust during school holidays. The early 18th century was a critical point in the evolution of the English landscape garden, seeing the transition from formal and geometrical baroque design to a more contrived, natural landscape, responding to the natural topography. Pope, surrounded by influential figures such as Lord Burlington and William Kent, was considered as a pioneer of the English landscape movement at the time. In his 1713 essay in the Guardian (a shortlived newspaper published only in that year) Pope wrote that the taste in ancient gardens was for the ‘amiable Simplicity of unadorned Nature’. In the same year, he translated the descriptions of the Gardens of Alcinous from Homer’s Odyssey. His knowledge of classical literature helped him to form and expand his ideas on a classical approach to architecture and garden design. The Shell Temple (Image: Trustees of the British Museum) A Plan of Mr Pope’s Garden as it was left at his Death (1845) He based the design of his garden on classical literature, antiquity and illusion. The garden was open to the public from 1736, attracting great interest and admiration. In its five acres he devised and experimented with a variety of layout and interesting features. ‘A Plan of Mr Pope’s Garden’ (1745) by John Serle shows it containing a pavilion known as the Shell Temple, stoves, a vineyard, an obelisk, a bowling green, a grove, an orangery, a garden house, two hot houses for growing pineapples and a kitchen garden. A number of well-known gardens of the early 18th century were influenced by Pope and his garden, including Prior Park, Stowe, Chiswick, Marble Hill and Cirencester Park. Paul Richens was commissioned to create an interactive digital reconstruction of the villa and garden, and of the adjacent Thames and buildings. This visual, A Virtual Arcadia, is projected in the section of the lobby facing the grotto, recreating the Thames view that Pope himself would have enjoyed. It is also available on trust’s website. The grotto consists of two main chambers, flanking a central chamber that leads down to a narrow passageway where visitors enter a new interpretation space. The central chamber features a group of Georgian mirrors, restored as part of the 2022/2023 restoration project. The grotto comprises a series of decorated chambers and a long causeway. Pope decorated the grotto with over 30 tons of ores, spars, mundic (pyrites), stalactites, crystals, Bristol and Cornish diamonds and marbles, alabaster, snakestones and freestone, as well as petrified wood, fossils, glass, coral and humming-bird nests. This remarkable collection, which is variously fixed into the walls and ceilings with a lime-mortar bed and/or iron clamps, was donated to Pope from his friends in Norway,
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