52° 30’ 21.83” N
1° 53’ 02.76” W
elev. 119m
Field Report
Aston Hall - some notes
1. Completed in 1638 , this may have been the last 'great house', completed in England before the onset of the (first) Civil War.
2. In the facial expressions of the gargoyles decorating the east and west portals you glimpse the impish grin of Merrie England - Jack-in-the-green, the spirit of Sherwood and Arden - irrepressible, impudent, doomed.
Ten years of bloodshed and the greenwood had gone, or at least had shrivelled into myth, surviving fitfully through songs of dissent and suppressed folklore. Down, but not out, the green man's maniacal grin reappears as anti-globalisation activists' Guy Fawkes' mask - reoccupying Wall Street, camped out on the steps of St Paul's, or looting the retail parks of Tottenham.
3. So there is no cosy, agreeable 'heritage'. It is a landscape of fortuitous survival, revival and pastiche, artful juxtapositions and accidental contrasts. The great house, a survival, its deer park divided into lots, sold-to Aston Villa to become the 'Fox's' Villa Park, the remaining rolling acres bricked over, industrialised, then abandoned.
The seventeenth century formal garden is pure pastiche, an invention of a 1930s unemployment relief scheme - a picturesque pre-cursor of workfare.
Artful juxtaposition (or accidental contrast), Villa Park's gleaming white Holte End Stand suddenly glimpsed through the walled rose garden's wrought iron gates.
Or put another way.....
voceti: The Aston Hall grotesques
Gallery
