Saturday, October 11, 2025
An unusual venue
This building was used by the old West Glamorgan County Council for formal dinners and other occasions, but my first experience of it was shortly after I was elected as a Welsh Assembly member in 1999, when Prince Charles hosted a formal (and largely inedible) dinner there.
Since then I have been back on a number of occasions, as an AM, as Lord Mayor of Swansea and also for a wedding reception. On each occasion the catering far exceeded my first experience, which I largely put down to menu choice - I'm chiefly a pie and chips man.
As the Margam Country Park website recounts, the Orangery was built by 1790 to house a great collection of orange, lemon and other citrus trees, which the Talbots inherited from their Mansel forebears:
Nothing is known for certain of the origin of these trees, but legends suggest that originally they were originally a gift for the crown. As they were being transported the ship was wrecked on the coast near Margam and the trees claimed by the Mansels. Travellers who journeyed through Wales at the end of the eighteenth century in search of picturesque beauty, and who published accounts of their tours, noted several versions of the legend. Queen Elizabeth I, Charles I, Charles II’s wife Catherine of Braganza and William III’s Queen Mary all appear in the variations of the story.
By the mid-eighteenth century the citrus collection numbered about one hundred trees and was housed in several greenhouses in the park. It was the bold design of Thomas Mansel Talbot to build the present Orangery, 327 feet in length, to accommodate the whole collection.
In Britain orange trees need protection from the severity of our winter weather, but in the summer months they can stand out of doors and were used to ornament the formal gardens of the time. As a building the Orangery is superbly functional; long and narrow with a series of twenty-seven tall windows to admit the winter light. The plain back wall contained fireplaces, from which hot air passed through flues. In its centre was the high door through which fully-grown trees could be wheeled into the garden.
A building of such length risked appearing monotonous, but this was avoided by imaginative treatment of the façade. Deeply-worked stone, offset by smooth-faced ashlar, holds light and shadow in the ever- changing, strongly emphasised, horizontal lines of the plinth. The band of rusticated vermiculated stone, the matching heights of key-stones, the frieze of triglyphs, and the row of sculptured urns on the skyline all give a sense of unity and harmony. The building ends with pavilions of smooth stone ornamented with delicately carved scrollwork and lit by Venetian windows.
The stone from which the Orangery is built was hewn locally, in Thomas Mansel Talbot’s own quarry at Pyle. The men who dressed the stone worked under the master mason William Gubbings, one of the craftsmen who had been employed earlier on the villa at Penrice under Talbot’s architect Antony Keck.
When the Margam estate was bought by the former Glamorgan County Council in 1973, the Orangery was in ruins. Four years later, the restoration of this impressive building had been completed and it was opened by the Queen in her Silver Jubilee Year.
