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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
by the friendly and knowledgeable volunteers who
picked out their favourite things for us (a pack of playing
cards made to advertise a brothel!) and even let me hold
the beautiful Victorian concertina. It really is delightful.
Entirely staffed by volunteers, admission is free and
donations are both welcome and deserved.
The third of the big estates in this part of the Surrey Hills
is today the Denbies Wine Estate, just outside Dorking,
which was bought by local businessman Adrian White in
1986. White planted vines on just under half of the land,
some 265 acres of the south facing slopes where the
topsoil is a vine friendly mixture of fertile loam and flint.
Today the average yield is 300,000 litres of wine each
year, most of which is sold direct from the estate.
Denbies is named for an early owner John Denby about
whom little is recorded but in the middle of the 18
th
century the farmhouse and land was bought by Jonathon
Tyers proprietor of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. Tyers
bought little of his showmans’ razzamatazz to Surrey
instead adorning his garden here with rather grisly
memento mori
– reminders of death!
A few owners later and the builders moved in, quite
literally, in the form of Victorian master builder Thomas
Cubitt. The son of a Norfolk carpenter Thomas Cubitt
rose to become the leading builder in London from the
1820s until about 1850. For the Duke of Bedford he built
Tavistock and Gordon Squares in Bloomsbury and for the
Grosvenors, the Dukes of Westminster, he laid out great
swathes of Belgravia including the North and West sides
of Eaton Square. He worked for Victoria and Albert on both
the East front of Buckingham Palace and their Isle of Wight
holiday home Osborne House. Thomas Cubitt’s son George,
a Surrey MP until he was elevated to the Upper House as
the First Baron Ascombe, is a great-great-grandfather of
Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall. In 1859 George Cubitt
commissioned Sir George Gilbert Scott to build an
extraordinary scaled down cathedral in the
High Victoriana
style to serve the 400 or so staff of the Denbies Estate plus
a school next door. A full time Rector was installed in
a Rectory tucked behind trees opposite this astonishing
church which has become known as the
church on the
North Downs Way
and the
cathedral in the woods.
It is the most surprising thing to see this massive church
with looming spire come to earth in a clearing in the woods.
If Tolkein had conceived of a church to plant in the Surrey
Hills for magical folk this would pretty much be it. Because
of the constant threat of metal theft the church is locked but
Moneypenny and I on our final reccie for the new tour
arranged to be met there by one of the parishioners, former
church warden and Dorking NADFAS member Dick Gover.
Inside the first thing that strikes the visitor is the elaborate
use of decorative stones and granites including a font of
Red Cornish Serpentine on a granite plinth. But it’s the
social story of St Barnabas that is so compelling: a
Downton Abbey sort of world with strict codes of etiquette.
House staff South of the Nave, outside workers and farmers
on the North side – a separation that was also applied in the
churchyard. Even after death did the people know their