Stowe

S1 E2: Stowe, one of the most remarkable creations of Georgian England, is the birthplace of the landscape garden. Created on a vast scale with 36 temples, eight lakes and a dozen avenues, Stowe launched the career of Lancelot Capability Brown and fostered a rebellion that overthrew the first British prime minister, Robert Walpole. Rather than being a garden of flowers and shrubs, Stowe is a garden of ideas and its grottos and classical monuments spell out a furious, coded, political manifesto. Stowes creator, Viscount Cobham, dreamt of climbing to the pinnacle of political power and establishing a long-lived dynasty, but less than a century after his death his family was to suffer one of the most scandalous bankruptcies in English History.