Nicola here. When I was a student in London, I lived near the Finchley Road. This was one of the main roads that led North out of the centre of London and it was often very busy with traffic. At one large roundabout there was a sight that always struck me as very odd: A Swiss chalet in the middle of the road. It was a pub and it was called, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Swiss Cottage.” The roundabout and the nearby underground station were named after it, and for such a busy and modern place it looked total incongruous.
I didn’t realise then that when the original “Swiss Tavern” was built there in 1804, it was part of a 
larger fashion for recreating Swiss landscapes in England and elsewhere as part of the Romantic movement. Yes, as is often the case, the poet William Wordsworth had a hand in bringing back the idea of “Swissness” as something that represented freedom and beautiful scenery. In 1790 he and a friend took a walking tour of Switzerland and he was awestruck by the landscape and also by a scale model he saw of Lake Lucerne, the mountains and the alpine cottages. He brought home the idea of creating little Switzerlands in the English countryside.
The craze for Swiss cottages lasted a long time, from the Georgian period right up to the Edwardian. By the 1830s it had taken root in America as well as in England, and also spread to other countries. The Koerner House in Spokane is an example of this style from the Edwardian era but as early as 1838, James Fenimore Cooper’s characters in the novel Home as Found complain of “Swiss Cottages” appearing on the banks of the Hudson as part of a building boom in New York. Cooper had hiked in the Swiss Alps himself and seen the real thing. He thought the copies were kitsch!
In England there are still a lot of these curious buildings around once you start looking for them. 
Often they were built by aristocrats looking to create fun places to entertain or to live in when they were pretending to be poor country folk. At Endsleigh in Devon there is a chalet built for the 6th Duke and Duchess of Bedford that was designed in about 1815 by Jeffrey Wyatville, complete with an Alpine garden, and furniture “a la Suisse” with wooden chairs and platters, hornspoons etc. Humphrey Repton landscaped the surrounding woodlands to make the area look more Alpine as well. The main room, which was used by the Duke and Duchess for picnics and shooting lunches, opens out onto a veranda perched high above a steep clearing in the forested Tamar River valley.
Over in Cahir in Ireland, Lord and Lady Cahir also jumped on the Regency bandwagon and asked John Nash to design an ornamental Swiss cottage where they could entertain their guests. As with the 18th century Queen’s hamlet at Versailles in France, these picturesque cottages were also popular as places where the aristocracy could pretend to be simple rustic peasants – 18th and 19th century cosplay! Often they would have dairies and other “working” farm buildings so that the Queen or Duchess could dress as a milkmaid and milk a cow if they felt like it. I can only imagine that if you were a bona fide peasant, you would have laughed at rich people playing at being poor – or perhaps thought they should try it for real. Thatched roofs were an important feature of many Swiss cottages built in England to add to the country feel of them; in reality of course, thatch looks gorgeous but can be more of a fire risk and is susceptible to decay. It’s also a perfect home for birds and rodents!
Just down the road from me is the cutest Swiss cottage imaginable which was built in about 1850, allegedly by Lord Barrington who 
wanted a replica of a chalet in which he and his wife stayed on their honeymoon in Switzerland. So romantic if true!
Jesse Watts-Russell went one better when he re-built the village of Ilam in Staffordshire – the entire village is in Swiss style. Again it was constructed in the early 19th Century and Jesse chose the design as he felt that the surrounding countryside of the Peak District had an alpine feel to it. However he didn’t do it for entertainment or to pretend to be poor; he was a philanthropist who had inherited a fortune from his soap manufacturer father and wanted to put it to good use. He also built the village hall and funded the school as part of his good works.
The Swiss garden at Shuttleworth is a gorgeous creation. It was designed by Lord Ongley in the 1820s at his home of Old Warden 
Park in Bedfordshire. The site was originally clay soil and completely flat but he had it transformed into Alpine foothills with mounds, ponds, serpentine paths and shrubberies, a Swiss Cottage, an aviary, huge trellises arching over the lawns, a thatched tree seat, complete with sentimental poem etched into a marble slab and a nearby melancholy walk and tiny chapel with a stained glass window. Small but beautifully ornate cast-iron bridges, an Indian Kiosk and a fine Grotto, which was later transformed into the Fernery completed the site. The garden is the only complete example of a Regency Romantic landscape in the UK and, as such, is of great historic significance. Like Jesse Watts-Russell, Lord Ongley also remodelled the local village in the same Swiss Picturesque style.
It’s lovely that there are still so many Swiss-style buildings, villages and gardens about the place to explore. They might not fool us that we are actually in Switzerland or even in a place that looks very authentically like Switzerland (it would take more than English snow to make them look real) but they are charming and an intriguing insight into a fashion that goes right back to the Georgian era. You can imagine Regency aristocrats, fresh from their travels, keen to spend their fortunes on re-creating their experiences at home. After all they didn’t have a holiday photo album! Or perhaps they longed to be free of all that wealth and responsibility and be a simple farmer – if only for a day!
We all love Regency romance but are you a Regency Romantic? Are you enchanted by the idea of wandering through an Alpine garden or staying in a Swiss cottage? What would be your ideal Regency setting - grand house, gorgeous garden, Regency cottage by the sea, or all of them?
