THE landscape park at Fawley Hill is like no other. Begun as a hobby, it has grown into a work of art with the classic elements of an aristocratic park, including roaming deer, rolling greensward, eyecatchers and follies. The difference is that its creator, the Hon Sir William ‘Bill’ McAlpine, who died in 2018, was inspired not by a vision of Arcadian antiquity, but the Railway Age. His celebration of the railways is on a scale that only the scion of a major construction company could ever have brought together. COUNTRY LIFE—no less—once called it ‘bonkers’, but Bill’s understanding of the workings of railways was the match of any Georgian Earl or Marquess’s knowledge of ancient Rome or Athens.
Fawley Hill has a strong element of the funfair, but it is based no less on connoisseurship, scrupulous research and an insatiable and impetuous passion for collecting. Of course, trains are not to everyone’s taste. As an Italian visitor to Fawley observed—perhaps ironically—‘lovely park, pity it is so close to the railway’, as he watched a steam engine disturbing the peace of the Thames Valley with loud chuffing, hoots and plumes of vapour.
Bill was first and always an engineer
