About the Film

This greenhouse restoration documentary film follows the repair of the Grade II* listed curvilinear glasshouse and potting shed at Felton Park, set within a stove-walled garden dating from 1774. Built in around 1830, it is one of the earliest surviving buildings to use slender, curved wrought iron glazing bars and fish scale glass, an innovative technique at the time, and one of only two or three comparable structures left standing in the UK. A project of this kind called for a greenhouse restoration documentary film that could hold together the historical detail, the craft work and the family history all at once, rather than treating any one of them as the main story.

A Rare Survivor

The greenhouse had sat on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk Register for several decades before restoration began. As owner Tim Maxwell explains in the film, that listing reflects just how unusual a survival it is.

This building has been on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk Register for thirty to forty years, and the reason they’re so keen on it is that it’s really highly unusual. A glasshouse is generally very fragile, so very few of them survive, particularly at this age.

A Family’s Pride, A Gentry Status Symbol

The garden and greenhouse belonged to the Riddell family, who came to the area in the late eighteenth century. For the family who later lived there, the greenhouse was a source of quiet pride rather than just a working building.

It’s just a lovely design and we were always very proud of it. People used to come and rave about it, and tell their friends they’d been to a place with a lovely greenhouse.

Archaeologist Harry Beamich places that pride in its original nineteenth century context, where a greenhouse like this served a genuinely social, competitive function as much as a horticultural one.

It’s a status thing, something to bring your friends to see. They introduced potentially exotic plants, like the old camellias that survive here, and the vinery function meant they could produce top quality dessert grapes for the table. It’s keeping up with the Joneses as much as anything.

Restoration proper began with the main contractor setting up on site, and the various specialist teams agreeing between them the order in which the work would need to happen.

The Hot Wall

The greenhouse is built against a large brick garden wall on its north side, known as a hot wall, with a series of flues built into the brickwork to carry heat along its length from furnaces set at intervals. Keeping that system running was a daily job in itself.

They used to have a garden boy whose job every day was just to walk up and down, putting a shovel of coal on them.

War, Neglect and a Derelict Building

Like many large houses of its size, Felton Park was commandeered during wartime, though the greenhouse itself survived largely untouched beyond some incidental use in the garden around it. Later, as the estate passed through quieter, less resourced years, the building fell into a more genuinely derelict state, patched with whatever glass and paint came to hand rather than properly restored, until parts of the structure were eventually cut away to let farm machinery through.

Designed by John Claudius Loudon

The glasshouse follows closely the recommendations of John Claudius Loudon, the Scottish garden designer and hothouse expert whose curvilinear designs were licensed to several ironworks in the early nineteenth century, including forges in London and Birmingham. Loudon’s aim, as the film explains, was to produce a shape capable of capturing the maximum possible light and heat across every season. The building itself turned out to be in two distinct phases, the west side constructed slightly later than the east, likely only a season or so apart, a detail only confirmed once restoration work exposed the ironwork underneath.

Metal, Glass and 8,500 Pieces

Restoring a structure like this meant treating almost every component as a separate, fragile problem. Every piece of ironwork had to be checked, cleaned and coated, since, as Tim Maxwell puts it in the film, the building is only as good as its weakest part. The glazing alone involved fitting around 8,500 individual pieces of glass into openings that had shifted and warped unevenly over nearly two centuries.

There’s glass here from every era from about 1830 onwards. One of the unusual aspects I found is the glass has actually got arsenic in it, a very small trace, all perfectly safe, but there are rare earth elements put into this glass to give a slight coloration and perhaps also to make it slightly opaque, to cut down the direct sunlight so the plants inside don’t get scorched.

Architect Robin Dower, whose practice oversaw the repair, describes the process itself as much about sequencing and patience as craft.

The repair process has been rather like a Mexican wave, several different processes starting from the west end of the glasshouse and moving eastward.

Bringing It Back to Use

With the structural and glazing work complete, the final stages were about returning the greenhouse to something closer to its original purpose, landscaping the ground around it and planting it with fruit rather than purely ornamental plants, in keeping with its history as a practical growing space rather than a display piece. For Tim Maxwell, a project with no background in heritage or architecture, it became something more than a one-off repair.

This has been quite a learning curve for me. I’m not involved in the architecture or heritage business at all by background. I’d be interested in getting involved in more heritage projects. It’s a fascinating experience.

Why This Film Matters

Felton Park brought together an unusually wide range of specialist voices for a single building, an architect, an archaeologist, a structural engineer, metalworkers and a stained glass specialist, alongside the family who had known and loved the greenhouse for decades before any of that expertise arrived. This greenhouse restoration documentary film tries to hold all of those perspectives together without flattening any of them into background noise, which feels like the right approach for a building whose whole value lies in exactly that kind of accumulated, layered detail.