Dominique Perrault's cafe pavilion in Priory Park, Reigate. Photograph: Arcaid/Rex Features
I had gone to Reigate in search of the grave of Samuel Palmer (1805-81). Palmer was the young English painter befriended by the visionary English poet and artist William Blake. Largely as a result of their meeting, Palmer went on to paint some of the most inspiring, unexpected and beautiful of all English romantic landscape paintings.
What I hadn't known until I went for a cup of tea in Reigate's handsome Priory Park is that a quite different vision has emanated in this ancient setting. Here is a brand-new circular pavilion café designed by Dominique Perrault, architect of none less than the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (1989-96), the enormous and controversial Paris library better known at home as the TGB, or Tres Grande Bibliotheque. This is the one with the huge L-shaped glass towers, shaped like open books, in which are stacked the millions of volumes available to readers tucked away in the dark depths of this Mitterand grand projet.
The Reigate pavilion is as surprising a design to come across in Priory Park as a Samuel Palmer landscape must have been to his contemporaries. In some lights and from some angles, it appears to hover just above the manicured lawns. All glass doors, floor to ceiling windows and mirror-polished stainless steel uprights, it positively gleams.
Inside, the bright pavilion offers tea and cakes, of course, as well as public lavatories, an office for café management and community police, and a burgeoning "interpretation centre" aimed at telling the story of the renovated Priory Park. The roof is supported by four columns, two of which have been clad in the form of cones. The heating system is as "green" as the park itself. The floor, all brightly coloured circles, is an artwork, although it will be interesting to see how it copes with tens of thousands of pairs of parkland shoes from now (it opened on 12th June) and on through the course of an English summer (warm rain/mud), autumn (cool rain/mud) and winter (cold rain/mud). The pavilion, though, is a delight, an up-to-the-minute parkland folly serving happily useful purposes while acting as a good old-fashioned eyecatcher in the landscape.
There is something delightfully English in the way that this is the first building in the country by one of France's leading architects. As I drank my tea, I tried to remember what other projects Perrault is working on, but even without access to the internet to help, I managed to think of the New Marinsky Theatre, St Petersburg, the European Court of Justice, Luxembourg, the Habitat Sky Hotel, Barcelona and a university in Seoul. All these are very grand projects. England has politely offered a tearoom in a park in the conservative Surrey commuter belt. I think this is rather great, but not all decent, upstanding Reigate folk feel the same.
Writing in a style antique even in Samuel Palmer's day, Barrie Singleton offers this hostile, if entertaining verse, entitled Ghastly Gazebo:
Four Square the Priory stands parked proudly prime As right today as in conception's year. Clean classic confident of time's defeat Renewed yet redolent of Heritage. Though time's soft touch erodes, good stone endures; The Priory wearing well its centuries And fronting-sward, in pride, brooks no affront As each the other pays mute compliment. Yet is this idyll now come under threat A plastic tea house - single use - then binned Roundly obscene - roundly to be condemned; Incongruous adjunct to that prior art. Oh Powers that Be: Awake and be aware! We plead in Reigate's name: "Don't put it there!"
Yet, there it is; the first glimpse on very English soil of the power of magisterial contemporary French design. Shame, though, about the cheap aluminium chairs; in Monsieur Perrault's drawings, these were to have been as modern as modern can be and as light as a fairy cake. But, what would our poet (no, not William Blake) have made of that?
