Category Harry Wardman
Henry Adams and Lady Lindsay in Washington
Within the intersecting circles of the story of the British Embassy, Henry Adams is the center point in its early history. His beloved home across from the White House brings together several elements of this Landscape of a Washington Place: the Embassy’s first landscape gardener (Elizabeth Sherman Hoyt, later Lady Lindsay); Beatrix Jones (later Farrand […]
The Myths of the British Embassy II: the Location with Lutyens
The previous entry in this website surveyed the District’s Gilded Age landscape with its Beaux-Arts architecture existing on Massachusetts Avenue before the British Chancery and Ambassador’s Residence arrived in the neighborhood. This was to address misinformation about and the perplexing view that the architect, Sir Edwin Lutyens, designed the United Kingdom complex in rural land […]
The Myths of the British Embassy I: the Location before Lutyens
There persists the unfortunate belief in some publications that in the 1920s the government of the United Kingdom chose a remote site with “little civilization nearby” for their new Washington Embassy. While the British with their previous diplomatic building pioneered the countryside around Connecticut Avenue—with livestock pens and crumbling Civil War barracks for neighbors—that is […]
The Time of Changes and Commemorations in the Embassy Gardens
What became the tumultuous decade of the 1960s at the Washington Embassy began with landscape gardener Perry Wheeler and Lady Caccia working to revitalize the gardens while enclosing them for additional privacy and protection. At the start of 1960, plantings (magnolias, hollies, viburnum, aucuba, cherry laurel, blue spruce) were put in to provide a dense […]
A Trowel for the British Embassy but not in the Gardens
It did not make mention in any of the newspaper reports of the laying of the cornerstone of the Lutyens-designed Embassy on 3 June 1928, but the “Washington trowel” was employed in the ceremony. Ambassador Esmé Howard, standing with American architect Frederick Brooke, builder Harry Wardman and some of the diplomatic community but mostly with […]
Lindsay’s Groundwork for the Gardens
With the return of the diplomatic corps and the beginning of the fall social season of 1930 in Washington, the press was filled with reports of the new British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue. The Ambassador’s Residence had already been put to work: the first large party to be held there was that August for 600 […]
Frederick H. Brooke
The on-site architect Frederick H. Brooke (1876-1960) came to play a pivotal role in the Lutyens’s British Embassy. Stamp and Greenberg, in their important study published in Lutyens abroad (2002), give him a significant amount of credit, relating how he was caught between the most often-absent British architect and the constraints of both the Treasury […]
Wardman and the British Embassy
For real estate developer and builder Harry Wardman (1871-1938), the new British Embassy in Washington was clearly his great ambition. As touched upon in a previous post on the history of the site, he maneuvered early on to secure the work, managing to sell to the Government the new location while taking on the project […]
The Construction and Beginnings of the Gardens
The cornerstone of the new Embassy was laid on 3 June 1928, in an informal ceremony with Ambassador Esmé Howard, American architect Frederick Brooke and builder Harry Wardman in attendance. A copy of the architectural plans, the names of the architects and builders, “and other official documents” (according to the Washington Post) were laid inside […]
Fashion (and Money) Follows the British Embassy
An aerial Associated Press photograph taken in October 1930 of the new British Embassy—five months after Lutyens’s final site visit and its first occupancy—captures the complex in its still-unfinished state. The areas for the pool and tennis court are excavated but not built, the terrace rose beds are barren, a construction road leads from W […]
Landscape of a Washington Place 
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