There can scarcely be a doubt that the happiest material for our garden sculpture and ornament is lead Gertrude Jekyll Due to its various properties, lead has been used both practically and decoratively throughout history. It is easy to extract and easy to work. It is ductile; it stretches and can be hammered, cast or cut. It does not rust and degenerates only very slowly. It is maintenance free. Strabo lists lead and tin as being amongst the great natural resources of Britain and it was those metals that first drew the Phoenician traders here and later helped persuade the Romans to occupy this remote land. Certainly, the Romans were quick to exploit what they found and lead ingots from the Mendips have been discovered dated AD 49, only six years after the invasion. Mines were subsequently opened up in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Flintshire.
In his Natural History, Pliny records: Lead is used for the manufacture of pipes and thin sheets. In Spain and Gaul it is mined with difficulty, but in Britain there are such large quantities near the surface that there is a law limiting its exploitation. Important people were sometimes buried in lead coffins or had their hearts placed in lead caskets. Other decorative items include lead fonts but, overwhelmingly, lead was used in building construction: hopper heads, downpipes and roofs. All of our great cathedrals were roofed in lead and there are dozens of examples of Mediaeval leaded spires on churches. With the Dissolution, one of the first things the wreckers did was to remove the lead from the roofs of the great abbeys and monasteries. Later, in the 17th and 18th centuries, lead cisterns were made in large numbers for big houses. Used to collect rainwater for domestic use, they were often embellished with crests or arms, dates and initials. In the garden, decorative pieces first appeared in the 1680s and remained popular until the 1770s. This was the golden age of English leadwork and virtually all of the great gardens of England contain leadwork of some kind from this period: statues, urns and lead cisterns, now used as planters. By the 19th century, newly cast lead garden ornaments were becoming rare. But in the 20th century a small revival took place beginning with the Bromsgrove Guild and ending with a number of small manufacturers, including the Bulbeck Foundry. Today, worldwide, three quarters of all lead consumed goes into making car batteries. The remainder is used in petrol, shot and still flashings and roofsThe golden age of English leadwork The origins of the ornamental garden lie generally in the Italian Renaissance and particularly in Bramante’s design for the Cortile del Belvedere in the Vatican in 1503. His use of a grand central axis, of parterres on different levels linked by flights of stairs was imitated and developed all over Italy and then France, culminating in Le Nôtre’s gardens at Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte. The use of statuary, urns and fountains within these gardens was prodigious. In England this fashion began in the late 1600s. But, whereas on the continent ornaments were made of marble or bronze, here we turned to lead, often painting them white to give the appearance of marble. In the earliest period, the most important lead ornament makers were the van Nost cousins, both confusingly called John. John van Nost the elder became established in the 1680s with his most famous work at Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire and at Hampton Court. On his death in 1710, his cousin John the younger inherited the business and supplied ornaments to many great houses including Stowe and Wrest Park. The van Nost yard at Hyde Park was eventually taken over by John Cheere in 1737 and for the next 50 years he became the leading lead figure maker employing a large workforce. His work can be seen at Castle Hill, West Wycombe Park, Syon House, Blair Atholl, Stourhead, Castle Howard and numerous other grand English houses. One of his biggest commissions was for the Portuguese Royal Place of Queluz. Other names of this period are Ardries Carpentiere (Andrew Carpenter), Edward Hurst and Thomas Manning. But as suddenly as the fashion for ornamentation had arrived, so in the 1770s the fashion changed. Out went the parterres and man’s iron mastery over nature; in came Capability Brown and his contrived natural landscapes. The demand for statues collapsed. By the time of Cheere’s death in 1787 the manufacture of lead garden ornaments had virtually stopped. The golden age of English leadwork was overThe Bulbeck Foundry differs from these 18th century giants in that we do not initiate or model up new statuary. But given every advantage of modern tools and materials we have been able to accurately copy some of the best pieces from this period. Please click on the Statues link at the head of the page and have a look at the River God, Meleager, the Lion and Lioness. These are wonderful examples plucked straight from the golden age. In particular, Cheere’s Lions are so representative of the 18th century, showing, as they do, warmth, humour and a total lack of pomposity.

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