Hello, I'm Lucy Worsley, chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

You're listening to our podcast that explores the history and stories of our six palaces.

These talks are a collection of some of our best live events.

I really hope you enjoy listening.

The history of the English Garden reveals more than expected about the past and its people.

This series explores the history of gardens as places of work, rest and leisure.

In this episode, historian Dr. Oliver Cox talks about the political history of gardens in the Age of the Enlightenment.

In the next 20 minutes, I'm going to stop my parents from rustling their crisp packets.

My father from making a Greek salad with all of the nice goods that he's been given by the lovely people

from HRP and do something really, really challenging. I'm going to try and make political history

interesting and I'm going to try and make garden history interesting. Now, any of you that have

found your way through the torturous world that is the Journal of Garden

History will know that at times Garden History can be staggeringly dull. I mean really, really

dull. I mean a real focus on that leaf rather than the entire forest. And so what I hope to do

today through a couple of case studies is really, sorry, I keep walking around this bloody thing.

What I hope today do today through a couple of case studies is show you the ways in the 18th century how gardens and politics interact.

And one of the most exciting things about this, and having been to the Magic Garden just now,

you will have noticed that lovely amphitheatre, that grass amphitheatre where, you know,

on a summer's day there are kids doing cartwheels, all of that kind of stuff.

I think the designer, when he put it in, had in mind Charles Bridgman's important garden amphitheaters of the early 1720s.

Indeed, that's what all of the primary school kids think when they are rolling around in the mud there.

They think, aha, this is a reference to Charles Bridgman.

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