John Walter III's Eton and Oxford education left him more of a scholar than his father. He had a nice taste in English literature with a fondness for Pope and Boswell. Under his influence The Times, which in his father's time had often been abusive, noisy and declamatory changed its tone; its English became clear, polished and restrained. Yet the architecture of Victorian Bear Wood is neither reticent nor refined. It is curious that John Walter II owned a loud-mouthed paper and a gentlemanly house, and his son a gentlemanly  paper and a loud-mouthed house. John Walter III, though an enthusiastic builder all his life, had less visual than literary taste; he was a typical Victorian Oxford Greats man, with more feeling for an iambic couplet than an Ionic entablature. And his architect, Robert Kerr was typical not only of his age, but of his age in its less sensitive aspects.

The decision to rebuild was taken in 1864, the house started in the summer of 1865 and finished in 1874. It was built of Bear Wood bricks and Mansfield stone, and roofed with Wesmorland slates. Its style might be called Jacobean or Jacobethan, the style then considered most suitable for an English gentleman's country-house. Pious or romantic families could build Gothic houses; but the sensible middle-of-the-road opinion of the time was that town-houses should be classical, country-houses Jacobean, and churches Gothic.

Southwest view towards the Binnacle

When looking at Bear Wood one needs to bear in mind two aspects of mid-Victorian taste, their hatred of symmetry or anything that could be thought to approach monotony, and their fondness for what was called at the time muscularity. The former was a direct reaction against Georgian architecture , and was held with an almost moral fervour.

 A Victorian architect felt really unhappy if he put two windows of the same shape next to each other, particularly on his more showy facades. What was called "variety of outline" was also much admired, and as a result Victorian skylines are often unforgettable. But both the variety and the skyline had to have some functional relevance (this was called "truthfulness"); at Bear Wood the two most prominent features are the water-tower and the main-staircase tower, and the other five staircases can all be easily spotted by their external treatment. The extraordinary proliferation of chymney-stacks, which figure prominently on the sky-line in old photographs, were removed for economy of maintenance some years ago.

A game the mid-Victorians were very fond of playing was the game of almost-symmetry. They liked a building that seemed to start out to be symmetrical but suddenly slipped in an irregularity, to show its independent spirit--the conventional adjective for symmetry with the mid-Victorian was "slavish." One can watch the game being played on both facades at Bear Wood. On the garden front all under the middle three gables is completely symmetrical, but the two turrets to either side are slightly different in both position and design, and after that symmetry goes over board. On the entrance front if one stands from the right hand gable, the design is a straight-forward symmetrical one, until the left-hand gable suddenly rushes head-on into the great tower; one is half buried in the other and a little staircase turret has also got involved in the collision.

Yet the confusion that results, the over whelming design of the tower, the barbaric profusion of ornament on the adjoining porte-cochere, add up to something which is both vigorous and effective. One of the qualities that mid-Victorians admired in architecture was what they called "muscularity." They liked buildings to have "go" and "vigour" --what Robert Kerr called "solid English vigour." It was the age of Tom Brown's Schooldays, of muscular Christianity as well as muscular architecture; the type of man admired was no longer the polished dilettante; but the honest upright Englishman who could knock a blackguard down in fair fight. The entrance front at Bear Wood is an exercise in muscularity. The great tower, with the two violent slopes of its staircase windows, and with its proliferation of pinnacles and pilasters in the upper stage rolling out in great scrolls into the lower stage looks as though it is about to burst with energy.

The square outline of the big tower is echoed by the smaller tower at the end of the servants wing, and the sloping windows of the main staircase by the miniature slope of the little staircase where the wing joins the main building. The front, as a result, has a basic unity, in spite of its multitude of elements. There is little unity about the garden front. I suspect Kerr wanted it to be gracious and domestic, in contrast to the stateliness of the entrance front-a difference symbolised by the high-born Victorian ladies (disguised as angels) carved to either side of the garden entrance. But the result is merely confused; an extraordinary mix-up of towers, turrets, roofs and gables that rambles on for nearly 100 yards concluding in that old favourite of Victorian country-house architects, the water tower.