Egham Memorial Lodges
Egham
Runnymede
Surrey, England
TW20 0AE
Runnymede’s National Trust memorial landscape, given in 1931 by Cara, Lady Fairhaven, in memory of her husband Urban Broughton to protect the Magna Carta water meadows, is defined north and south by Lutyens’s 1930–2 lodges and kiosks—octagonal, bell‑roofed or rectangular pavilions with Portland‑stone piers and urns, one urn commemorating Franklin Roosevelt.
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Description
Not a village but a protected area of water meadows on the W bank of the Thames N of Egham and a place of historical renown as the site of the signing of Magna Carta in 1215. From 1734 this was also the home of the Egham Races. 188 acres of land were donated to the National Trust in 1931 by Cara, Lady Fairhaven, an American citizen, as a memorial to her husband, Urban Broughton, who had acquired the land to save it two years before. The memorial area is crossed by the road from Egham to Windsor and defined at its N and S ends by LODGES, designed (or ‘sadly over-designed’ according to Nairn) by Lutyens, 1930–2, and a pair of KIOSKS. Octagonal with bell-shaped octagonal tile roofs and in front Portland stone piers with urns, one of which is also a memorial to Franklin Roosevelt. Another bigger pair, rectangular with hipped roofs, at the Windsor end, 1½ m. NW. Another 107 acres of wooded land on Coopers Hill was given to the Trust in 1963. (O’Brien et al., 2022, p.625)
Bibliography
O’Brien, C., Nairn, I. and Cherry, B. (2022) Surrey. Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England. New Haven: Yale University Press., Nairn, I., Pevsner, N. (1971) Surrey (Pevsner Architectural Guides: Buildings of England). 2nd edn. Yale University Press.