'Pride And Prejudice' Temple To Be Restored By National Trust

Pride and Prejudice temple to be restored by National Trust

A temple featured in the film Pride and Prejudice is being restored

to its 18th century glory as part of a £290,000 National Trust project.

3 Jul 2009
The Telegraph.co.uk

The temple was used as the location for a rain-drenched dramatic exchange between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet. Photo: ALLSTAR Work will being next week on The Temple of Apollo, at Stourhead, Wiltshire, which dates from 1765.

The National Trust has spent months gathering historic paintings, family records, accounts, letters and visitors' diaries to find out how the monument would have originally appeared.

Heritage TV or a restoration comedy?"The original roof has gone through several manifestations since
it was built," said Emily Blanshard, project manager.

"Photographs from the 1890s show it in its sorriest state with its windows broken, a flat roof or no roof at all. It stayed exposed to the elements until the 1950s when the National Trust was able to finally re-roof the temple.

"The new, zinc-covered roof made the building water-tight again but the shape of the dome did not follow the original design. Now we have the chance to put that right."

The temple was built in 1765 by Henry Hoare as his finishing touch to the famous landscape garden.

It was designed by Henry Flitcroft and influenced by an engraving of a circular temple at Baalbec, an ancient Syrian city now part of the Lebanon, and the Temple of the Sun at Kew Gardens, which was destroyed in 1916.

The temple became a favourite spot for romance and was used as the location for a rain-drenched dramatic exchange between Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet in the 2005 remake of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice starring Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen.

But over the last 10 years the roof has deteriorated and now the zinc covering leaks, the wooden timbers are rotting, internal plasterwork is covered with green algae and there is extensive water damage to the stonework at the top of the temple.

Timber from the Stourhead estate will be used to form the structure of the new dome and several Douglas fir trees have already been felled and mechanically dried in the Stourhead western estate timber yard.

The new dome will be covered in sheets of lead to keep it watertight and essential repairs to the exterior stonework will also be carried out.

The walls inside the temple will be re-plastered and gilded plasterwork based on a letter written in 1801 by Reverend Warner, the Rector of Stourton, will be recreated.

Rev Warner's letter states: "The roof of the Temple spreads into a dome and has a double ceiling; in the lower is the aperture, and in the coving of the other, a splendid gilt representation of the Solar Rays, which, receiving the real light of this orb by an artful construction, throws into the Temple below a most splendid reflection when the sun is in its strength."

As no images of the interior exist, the ceiling will be based on the designs used for Kew Garden's Temple of the Sun.

The work is expected to finish by February 2010, and is being funded by £80,000 from the Wolfson Foundation and the rest from the National Trust and fundraising.