Exceeding Fine Country: An Eighteenth Century Tour of Yorkshire Gardens

Part of the York Georgian Society 2024/2025 Autumn Lecture Series.

This talk examines the travel accounts of Philip Yorke, later 2nd Earl of Hardwicke (1720-1790), and his wife, Jemima Marchioness Grey (1722-1797), focusing on their tours of Yorkshire – which Grey judged to be ‘exceeding fine country’. Both keen travellers, the couple often spent their summers touring the length and breadth of the country as they sought inspiration for their own garden improvements at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. Their travel diaries, which they had begun in the early 1740s, reveal shifting attitudes to garden design and engagement with the emerging discourse of the picturesque, which was particularly evident in their accounts of Studley Royal near Ripon. While Yorke had praised Aislabie’s improvements when he first visited in 1744; by the time he visited again with Grey in 1755, both were critical of the way the gardens had been ‘tortured’ to fulfil the owner’s fancy – preferring instead the ‘wild Hilly romantic Country that forms Studley Park.’

About the speaker: Jemima Hubberstey completed her PhD in 2021, in which she examined the connection between literary coteries and garden design in the mid-eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the circle that met at Wrest Park in Bedfordshire. She subsequently worked on a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship between the University of Oxford, English Heritage, and the National Trust, which explored the lost literary connections between Wrest Park and Wimpole Hall in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In 2023, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Oxford, exploring elite women and the intellectual life of the country house in the eighteenth century. She now works in the Research Team at Historic Royal Palaces and co-ordinates the lecture series for York Georgian Society.

All York Georgian Society lectures take place on a Saturday afternoon in the Medical Society Rooms in Stonegate, starting at 2.30pm, followed by tea. They are free for members of the Society. They are also free for students at the university; we suggest that other non-members make a voluntary donation of £5 to attend any given lecture.