Gatton Park is probably Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s least famous landscape. It is tucked away near Reigate Hill, just beyond the M25, and even in the 300th anniversary year of Brown’s birth it is an unlikely place to visit. Because it shares its plot with a school and stables, you can only go on the first Sunday of the month or if you arrange a tour in advance. A bother, I grant you, when there are so many glorious landscapes to explore elsewhere. But Gatton Park has other attractions, too.
For more than 50 years, from 1888, this was the estate of the ‘Mustard King’, Sir Jeremiah Colman. An hour or two spent touring the 260-acre plot by golf buggy may well leave you hungry for an old-fashioned Mustard Bath (‘It will supple your limbs…steady your nervous systems!’).
It might also make you feel like a member of the Mustard Club, the ingenious advertising idea dreamed up for Colman’s in the 1920s by the crime writer Dorothy L.
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