Harold Ainsworth Peto

Harold Ainsworth Peto FRIBA (11 July 1854 – 16 April 1933) was a British architect, landscape architect and garden designer, who worked in Britain and in Provence, France. Among his best-known gardens are Iford Manor, Wiltshire, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, West Dean House, Sussex, and Ilnacullin, County Cork, Ireland.

Harold Ainsworth Peto was born in London on 11 July 1854. He was the son of a prosperous builder, engineer and railway-contractor, Samuel Morton Peto, of Somerleyton Hall in Lowestoft, Suffolk, and of Sarah Ainsworth (née Kelsall), his father's second wife. Harold had four step-brothers and -sisters and ten brothers and sisters. Somerleyton Hall, where Harold spent his boyhood, had been rebuilt in the 1840s in Neo-Renaissance style and had a large winter garden and a parterre designed by William Andrews Nesfield. In 1855 Harold's father was made a baronet; but in the 1860s his businesses ran into trouble, so that in 1863 he sold Somerlyton Hall and in 1866 became bankrupt. Briefly Harold was sent to board at Harrow School (1869–1871), but he left school at seventeen and did not pursue a higher education.

On leaving school he was apprenticed to a joiner for nearly a year, then entered the practice of the architects J. Clements of Lowestoft. A year later he joined the London architects, Karslake and Mortimers.

In 1876 Peto went into partnership with architect Ernest George - a partnership which would last sixteen years. He and George designed houses in Kensington and Chelsea, as well as country houses. In 1883 Peto became a Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); but ill health compelled him to leave London. During these years he kept diaries recording his extensive travels - to Italy, America, Spain and Greece.

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