Category Normanstone Drive

The Myths of the British Embassy I: the Location before Lutyens

October 29, 2014 · by · in Ambassador James Bryce, British Ambassador's Residence Washington, British Embassy Gardens, British Embassy Washington, Bryce Park Cathedral Heights, Clifton, Elizabeth Sherman Hoyt, Frederick Brooke, Harry Wardman, James Bryce 1st Viscount Bryce, Lady Lindsay, Massachusetts Avenue, Naval Observatory, Normanstone, Normanstone Drive, Normanstone Park, Northview, Rock Creek Park, Sir Edwin Lutyens · Leave a comment

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 […]

What Remains of the Nineteenth Century

October 13, 2013 · by · in British Embassy Gardens, Dumbarton Oaks, Dumbarton Oaks Park, Herman Hollerith, John Adlum, Normanstone, Normanstone Drive, Normanstone Park, Oak Hill Cemetery, Robert Barnard, Rock Creek Park · Leave a comment

Not much remains of the earlier pastoral landscape. Located most likely where Lutyens’s complex, along with Eric Bedford’s New Chancery (1955-1962), now dominates, all traces of Normanstone’s buildings are gone, surviving only in photographs, maps and the family records. However there are echoes of Normanstone’s sloping terrain, streams, farm roads, orchards and that gardening was […]