How to get there

By train: the nearest station is Dorking or Dorking Deepdene. Taxis are available from Dorking Station.

By car: Turn south off the A25 at Wotton, into Hollow Lane, with a clear sign pointing you to “Leith Hill, Friday Street, Abinger Common”.  The lane is narrow, single-track in places, with steep banks.  After just over 1 mile you will reach a grassy triangle on the right with a well with a Horsham stone roof over the pump. The chimneys and red roofs of Goddards can be seen behind the well.  Indicate right into the sharp turning back but don’t actually turn into the lane – the entrance to the car park is off Hollow Lane on the right at the far end of the road junction and takes you into a yard with outbuildings. Landmark Trust car park signs will indicate where to park.

Goddards Study Day 2026

Wednesday, 10 June 2026, 10:30am-4:30pm

Goddards, Abinger Common, Dorking, Surrey RH5 6JH

Coffee

The day will begin at Goddards at 10:45am with coffee.

The Talk

Exploring the estate: teasing out the meanings of the architecture and horticulture of the Imperial War Graves Commission
The architecture and horticulture of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission inspire awe and wonder at its beauty and ability to transform sites of pain and loss into places of solace and inspiration. In this talk, the design details inherent in the ‘house style’ of the Commission are explored with particular reference to the signature facets of both the Principal and Assistant Architects, the horticultural planning, and the cultural inheritance they brought to their work for the Commission.

Our Speaker

Professor Mark Connelly was drawn into his History anorak lifestyle when, as a small boy, he became fascinated by ladybird history books. For him, the subject of History was all about castles, knights, Airfix kits (constructed with incredibly little skill and amazing amounts of glue) and Action Man Scorpion tanks.

This obsession has been taken into adulthood and he now combines his interest in films, television and visual images with his interest in military history, this is reflected in many of his publications. Not content with keeping his interests to himself he now shares his passion for history with others, most notably his students and his family. As a result, he claims that his wife is now adept at spotting a Commonwealth War Graves Commission headstone or a war memorial in a misty churchyard from quite some distance away.

Lunch

The price includes a two-course buffet lunch, to be held at 12.30. Lunch will be served with wine.

Afternoon Visit

This year we are being welcomed to  The Vann gardens.

As connoisseurs of Sir Edwin Lutyens’s early Surrey masterpieces, our arrival at Vann introduces us to the work of one of Ned’s most respected contemporaries: William Douglas Caröe. Purchased as a near-ruin in 1906 by Caröe (then the prestigious architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners), this Grade II* listed home offers our group a spectacular lesson in how this Arts and Crafts architect handled historic building conservation and landscape design.

Similar to Lutyens’s Great Dixter, Caröe painstakingly peeled back centuries of alterations on a genuine 1540 timber-framed hall-house, seamlessly weaving it together with an 18th-century barn, a granary, and even old pigsties into a triumphant, cohesive country home.

Study how Caröe expertly tied together three centuries of disparate agricultural buildings using local Bargate stone, timber framing, and tile-hanging. It is a masterclass in the “organic growth” philosophy that heavily informed Lutyens’s own Surrey vernacular.

Caröe  built the long stone and oak wisteria-covered pergola on the opposite side of the house, but he turned to his near neighbour Gertrude Jekyll to design the Water Garden – full of shade and damp-loving perennials. It is a garden of contrasting subdued shades of bold green foliage, such as rodgersias, leucojum, hostas and ostrich ferns. Beyond Jeykll’s Water Garden lies the semi-wild White Garden planted with early spring bulbs, the garden then dissolving into natural coppiced woodland.

Tickets are £65 per person.

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