Keeper's Cottage

An estate with a long and varied past

Keeper’s Cottage is a model cottage tucked away in the woods. It was built in 1878 for Joseph Shuttleworth, who wanted to bring shooting on the estate up to the fashionable standards of the day. For a few years we can imagine this cottage being the hub of prodigious Edwardian shooting parties, with the gamekeeper hatching pheasants at the back and rearing them in pens on the warren. The Shuttleworth Estate is best known today for its collection of vintage aeroplanes, but its history stretches back far earlier. In the Middle Ages, the area belonged to Warden Abbey on the other side of today’s village (its remnants are another Landmark). In the early 18th century, Sir Samuel Ongley, a wealthy London linen draper, bought what would become the Shuttleworth Estate and it was his descendant who, in the 1820s, created the famous Swiss Garden and began the model village of Old Warden.

Restored using traditional crafts

The Shuttleworths, rich industrialists, acquired the estate in 1872 and golden years of weekend shooting parties followed. But after the 1940s Keeper’s Cottage was left deserted. The sitting house and yard outbuildings collapsed and the detached kennel block became almost as ruinous. Luckily the original plans of its local architect builder, John Usher, survived and so we were able not just to restore the cottage, but also to rebuild the outbuildings. You may not have to feed the hounds at dusk or fend off poachers, but you can still appreciate the sensible accommodation wealthy Victorians built for their employees – especially those who could raise a pheasant or two.

The lands of Old Warden manor passed at first into royal hands and then in the 1690s, various portions of land were consolidated as Old Warden Park by a rich linen draper called Samuel Ongley. It was almost certainly Samuel Ongley who built Queen Anne’s Summerhouse in around 1713.

The Ongley family owned the Old Warden estate until 1872. In the late 18th century, Robert Henley, inheriting through his mother, became 1st Baron Ongley of Old Warden. It was his grandson, the 3rd Lord Ongley, who created the picturesque Swiss Garden on the other side of the estate (now restored and open to the public) and began to build the model village at Old Warden in the 1830s. However, by the 1870s the family’s wealth was failing and their line exhausted. In 1872 the estate was sold to another self-made man, Joseph Shuttleworth.

Joseph Shuttleworth was the son of a Lincolnshire shipwright who spotted the potential of steam. With Nathaniel Clayton, in 1842, he formed The Clayton & Shuttleworth Co., an iron foundry and engineering business that made mobile steam and traction engines. By 1872, when Joseph Shuttleworth came to Old Warden, the firm had branches throughout Europe and exported their engines all over the world. Shuttleworth employed architect Henry Clutton to demolish the old brick mansion and build him a new one. Shuttleworth took as his model Gawthorpe Hall in Lancashire, an early Jacobean seat of Shuttleworth namesakes but not, it seems, his ancestors. Clutton transformed its design into the ‘Jacobethan’ mansion that stands at Old Warden today.

Working with Clutton was a local architect called John Usher. Estate accounts show that it was Usher, rather than Clutton, who in 1877-8 designed and built Keeper’s Cottage, a short distance from the summerhouse on The Warren and today also a Landmark. Both Joseph Shuttleworth and his son Colonel Frank Shuttleworth (who inherited the estate in 1883) loved to shoot, and Old Warden became renowned for its pheasant and partridge shooting. Queen Anne’s Summerhouse perhaps provided the shooting party with a suitable setting for refreshments.

In 1940, Frank’s only son and heir, Richard Shuttleworth, died in a flying accident. His mother Dorothy decided to make the estate over to an educational trust in his memory and the mansion became a college for countryside-based studies. Both Queen Anne’s Summerhouse and Keeper’s Cottage became derelict, their repair beyond the resources of a trust devoted to other aims. In 2001, knowing about Landmark’s restoration of Warden Abbey on the neighbouring Whitbread Estate in the 1970s, the Shuttleworth Trust approached the Landmark Trust to take on both Keeper’s Cottage and Queen Anne’s Summerhouse, offering generous donations towards their restoration costs.

Keeper’s Cottage is a model gamekeeper’s establishment provided in 1878 by Joseph Shuttleworth. The Cottage, outbuildings and kennels together form a handsome example of Victorian model estate architecture, based on the pattern books published to help architects, builders and clients design ideal homes for people from all levels of society. The fashion for such dwellings (and there are many in Old Warden village) was driven partly by benevolent landowners’ desire to improve the living conditions of their estate workers and partly by the same landowners’ wish to create a picturesque landscape in which to exist and demonstrate their position in local society.

Estate accounts show that it was John Usher, rather than Henry Clutton, who designed and built Keeper’s Cottage in 1877-8. Usher’s designs for the cottage and its outbuildings are now at the Bedford & Luton Archive Service. The gamekeeper was a crucial member of the estate team in building up the pheasant and partridge shooting for which it became well-known. The preparation for the shoots and their management would have been masterminded from Keeper’s Cottage, where pheasant chicks were hatched in the sitting house and working dogs housed in the kennels.

Keeper Richard Aireton and his family were the first of several such estate families to live at Keeper’s Cottage. However, despite being such a model establishment in the 1870s, the Cottage failed to keep up with the times. Left without water or electricity, it became first a weekend cottage and was finally left deserted. By the time the Landmark Trust was approached for help, the Cottage’s outbuildings had mostly fallen down, its roof had holes in it, the windows were boarded up and floorboards were rotten and dangerous. The roof of the detached kennel block had collapsed.

The metal window frames had almost all survived but had to be reglazed and each diamond frame repainted – a laborious task. Much of the internal woodwork had to be replaced and a partition wall was taken down to make room to install a modern kitchen. Upstairs, the smallest of the original bedrooms was made into a bathroom.

At first, it was not planned to reinstate the outbuildings (coal house, washhouse, WC and sitting house - where the pheasant chicks were hatched) but the discovery that John Usher’s plans survived allowed the outbuildings to be reconstructed without speculation. The later, detached kennel block was also repaired, complete with cauldron for boiling up the bones and mash for the dogs’ feed – another of the Head Keeper’s responsibilities. This recreation of a model gamekeeper’s establishment provides a fascinating glimpse into another, earlier world of Edwardian shoots, a sport made possible only by the skill and dedication of keepers like those who lived here.

Supporters of Keeper's Cottage

Landmark gratefully acknowledges donations towards the restoration of Keeper’s Cottage from the Shuttleworth Trust, English Heritage, a private donor and the estate of the late Diana Wray Bliss.