Find out what remains of the colossal country house whose 'corpulent buffoon' of an owner had it blown up with vast quantities of gunpowder
Melanie Bryan revisits Eastbury Park in Dorset — which was photographed for Country Life 99 years ago, decades after large parts of it were demolished.
2026 marks the tercentenary of the death of Sir John Vanbrugh, the architectural genius behind national treasures such as North Yorkshire’s Castle Howard, Oxfordshire’s Blenheim Palace and Lincolnshire’s Grimsthorpe Castle. However, there is one Vanbrugh creation that won’t be receiving coach parties of inquisitive visitors during this year’s celebration of his life: Dorset’s Eastbury Park.
Country Life’s former Architectural Editor Christopher Hussey and principal photographer Alfred E. Henson recorded the property as it stood in 1927. While the vast kitchen wing and court still remained in the form of a standalone mansion, the rest of the building — the scale of which was only exceeded by Blenheim, Castle Howard and Seaton Delaval in Vanbrugh’s works — had been surrendered to the reclamation companies and explosives experts decades before, a mere 57 years after the first brick was laid.
This engraving of Eastbury's facade, designed by Sir John Vanbrugh, by Henry Hulsbergh was done from a drawing in 'Vitruvius Britannicus' or 'The British Architect'.
Vanbrugh had been engaged by George Dodington, a Lord of the Admiralty under William III and Queen Anne, to design a palace to replace the farm he had purchased in 1708 or 1709 (accounts vary) on the edge of Cranbourne Chase. For years the plans went back and forth between Dodington and Vanbrugh until, in 1718, work finally began on the vast complex. The farm was to be replaced with a mammoth edifice that was to be 570ft in length (173.7 metres or a little less than two football pitches) and contain within it five courts in a singular, most impressive alignment. All was going well, with the office courts that were to flank the central block completed, when, in 1720, Dodington died. However, he didn’t pass without extensive and complicated plans for his legacy to be realised. He left a sum of £100,000 (more than £18 million in today’s money) in trust to be invested in land, the profits from which were to be used to continue the building of his and Vanbrugh’s monumental vision. Entrusted to see through his plan was his nephew, one George Bubb.
These caricatures of Lord Melcombe and Lord Winchelsea were published on December 22, 1781. They were done by Francesco Bartolozzi after William Hogarth.
Bubb, who presumably under instruction of his uncle had officially changed his surname to Dodington in 1717, appears to have been a caricature of the excesses of the Georgian gentleman. Brought up by his late uncle, he mixed in high circles from a young age and advanced himself to the status of close friend and confidant of Frederick, the Prince of Wales. Bubb, like his mentor, was a political animal who for much of his life worked as a MP; he also served as Treasurer of the Navy, Lord of the Treasury and Treasurer to the Chamber of the Prince of Wales. Unlike his mentor, he was a political turncoat, swapping sides and backstabbing to his own perceived advantage on numerous occasions — much to the chagrin of his contemporaries. Lord Roseberry called him ‘the most avid of political harlots’. Alexander Pope was equally scathing: ‘He is too much a half-wit to love a true wit, and too much half-honest to esteem any entire merit’. Hogarth (admittedly, not known for flattering anyone) sketched Bubb as a bewigged, corpulent buffoon in a fancy brocade frock coat, straining to contain his vast, protruding belly. He was a prominent member of the infamous all eating, all drinking (we won’t talk about the rest of it) Hell Fire Club — so prominent that after his death, the founder, Sir Francis Dashwood, constructed (with Bubb’s funds) a vast, open air mausoleum to him on top of the hill in West Wycombe that hides the infamous caves below.
At first, it did not look like the junior Dodington had much interest in finishing Eastbury. He’d recently returned to England, following a two year stint as a Spanish envoy. In the ensuing years, he only ventured west of London in the summer — to develop Eastbury’s gardens and party with influential poets and artists. The project only restarted in 1724 and was eventually completed, under the supervision of Roger Morris in 1738 — at an estimated cost of £140,000 (about £28.45 million).
Contemporary accounts describe the interiors as excessive as Bubb’s waistline. Think crimson satins, gilded leathers and floral velvets covering the walls; ceilings painted in elaborate styles; gold and silver lace carpets. Marble tables were sourced from Italian palaces and vast statues adorned the entrance hall.
By the time Country Life visited in 1927, two saplings had taken up residence on top of the remaining entrance arch.
Somewhat inevitably, Bubb’s extravagant excesses soon started to catch up with him. In 1749, on the first page of his infamous diary, Bubb complained about being ‘...Grievously afflicted with the first fit of the gout’. His political career continued and he ventured into opposition journalism, but he decided to dispose of his inheritance — perhaps the long carriage ride from Dorset to London was becoming too much to bear — in 1760. A piece published on August 31 of that year in the Sherborne Journal advertised the sale of Portland Purbeck and ‘other valuable stone and marble, brick, slate, lead, iron, glass sashes, timber and floors’. A year later, Bubb died — with Eastbury still in his legal possession. As per the wishes of his late uncle, the hulking property was bequeathed to another relative, Earl Temple, who already had his own Vanbrugh in the majestic form of Stowe House. Unwilling to move to Dorset, and unable to afford the upkeep of two vast properties, he put the (by then) unfashionable southern property up for sale. When it failed to attract a buyer he offered an annuity of £200 a year to anyone willing to live in it. Nothing. And so the reclamation and demolition troops moved in — armed with Bubb-like quantities of gunpowder.
The kitchens survived total annihilation and were converted into a mansion of their own — and occupied for some time by Josiah Wedgwood and his family. By the time Country Life turned up in 1927, the Farquarson family had been in situ for more than a century. Hussey’s final words on his visit to the shadow of the property still ring true 99 years on: ‘To-day, though nothing but some uneven ground marks the site of the main block and opposite wing, the place has as much of that romance with which Vanbrugh aimed at enduing his classic masses. It proceeds as much from what has vanished as from what survives. To one standing in the grass where once spread his tawdry enfilades, even George Bubb looms up a Falstaff.’
Eastbury House is still privately owned.
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