Anke: Royal Tunbridge Wells

Calverley Grounds Concept

Whilst randomly googling about I stumbled across a rather intriguing website and I just had to share it. It turns out that after a quick email, the owner, Grant Beerling, is a really nice chap and agreed to share some of the details with all of us.

Click image for much larger version. Copyright Grant Beerling.

Grant, the owner of a local garden design company, designed this wonderful concept of Calverley Grounds for his BA in Landscape Architecture. He calls it “a complete fantasy project, throwing in various ideas and theories of how people use and move through a public space.”

Click image for much larger version. Copyright Grant Beerling.

I say that this could become something better than a fantasy. It could, nay should, be a reality. You only have to pore over some of the delicious details to realise why. Notice the bridge crossing over Mount Pleasant to connect to the future shopping centre on the Ritz Cinema site, it even has planting and seating. How about the new concert bowl with its view over the lake for wonderful summer performances. How about the waterfall with a café underneath? How about the tunnels and ravine walks carved into local sandstone? All utterly gorgeous ideas.

Click image for much larger version. Copyright Grant Beerling.

Grant produced a few differing concepts on his way to the final design, I've included a few here to show you some more of his great ideas he had along the way. underimage Grant’s early concepts had ways of keeping the AXA PPP building.

“The big idea is to reconnect Tunbridge wells with the Park (known as the grounds really needs to changed as it conjures up the wrong picture as one thinks of sport, not leisure). So when some one says Tunbridge Wells they would think Calverley Park. Connect with people and their every day life, whether using its direct routes as a more pleasant walk from one end of town to another or stopping for a cup of coffee and a rest whilst admiring the views, promising to come back another day to explore further. Connect Business so that they have a vested interest in the park staying well maintained (through Business rates). Concert venue, water and ice, fantastic planting scheme, restaurants, circular walk/run, all designed to pull visitors and regulars into the park. It should be part of the day when in Tunbridge Wells.”

The bridge over Mount Pleasant. Copyright Grant Beerling.

Even though Grant states “[I] love the Tunbridge Wells Town Hall, and actually like the Axa Building opposite…", the AXA PPP building has had to make way for his bold concept. The existing Mount Pleasant Avenue car park has also been sacrificed to extend the park. The extension of the park is a fabulous, if ambitious, idea that provides a traffic-free walk from Crescent Road all the way down the hill to the bottom of Mount Pleasant. You can also see that the bottom of Mount Pleasant Avenue has been tree-lined to give pedestrians a much safer route into the park from the main road. Admittedly this might make it a little tough for cars entering the BBC car park here but it could be done.

“One concept that is really is important (to me at least) is the two park idea, the upper area for short stay (lunch time crowd, and the lower area for a longer stay i.e. to be explored). So the upper area for sitting, eating, and people watching when time is short.”

The bridge over Mount Pleasant. Copyright Grant Beerling.

With the current plans for bringing water back to The Wells (more on this later), this fabulous concept would really bring it back with a huge bang.

Finally, Grant says he needs "just need £20million to build it..... offers welcome.” So, £20m divided by the number of local residents = £354 each. Pricey but oh so worth it. What do you think of Grant's concepts?

Click image for much larger version. Copyright Grant Beerling.

Many thanks to Grant for allowing me to share his concepts. You can see many more pictures on his concept website. Best of luck with the garden design business, Grant, and I hope you manage to build this one one day.

Calverley Park Ice Rink this Christmas

Mrs Anke and I were invited to the Hotel du Vin for the launch of the 2011 Royal Tunbridge Wells Ice Rink which will be in Calverley Grounds this Christmas. As well as local dignitaries and celebrities, Robin Cousins, former Olympic skating champion and head judge on Dancing on Ice, made a guest appearance.

The launch party in full swing, click to visit full gallery.

You can visit the official Tunbridge Wells at Christmas website to book tickets and read more information. You can also book tickets at the Assembly Hall from the 24th of October.

There are lots more images from the event, click here to see the gallery.

Calverley New Town: Calverley Park Gardens

One of the findings that came out from a recent question on our Facebook Fan Page was that readers wanted to learn a little more about some lost buildings of Tunbridge Wells, well this ties in quite nicely with the next in the Calverley New Town Series. So, let’s explore Calverley Plain, or as we know it today, Calverley Park Gardens.

Calverley Park Gardens is a laurel-bordered road fringed with elegant and substantial villas, each standing in its own luxuriant grounds. The Gardens were laid out by Decimus Burton in 1828 at the same time as Calverley Park but it would take many more years to complete than the main Park.

The villas were all set in very informal landscapes and all had legal agreements on their construction that stated that their grounds should be of at least three quarters of an acre and that their front fences be set at least seven feet from the road with room for the planting of shrubs and bushes, a softening feature which still gives Calverley Park Gardens its character today and has been emulated in other parts of town to great success.

Map showing the virgin building grounds of Calverley Park Gardens, complete with pleasure grounds.

Walking down the gentle curve of the road from Pembury Road the sights of the newly constructed Calverley Crescent and the imposing tower of Holy Trinity Church would have slowly revealed themselves. It must've been a wonderful sight, and in fact this entrance to Tunbridge Wells is one of my favourites.

Apart from Baston Lodge, No.2 Baston Cottage was the first building laid out in Calverley Plain and was possibly meant as the entrance way or guardian property of The Gardens. It would only be fitting that the creator of the fabulous architecture of the New Town would create a small piece of it for himself and this piece was Baston Cottage. Decimus really indulged in his elegant but rustic gothick architectural style with his own home, giving it gingerbread gables and candystick chimneys.

Decimus lived in Baston Cottage for about twenty years before leaving in the 1850s when all the remaining plots of the Plain had been sold, he had also constructed No.3 The Hollies further down the road but this is as far as he got in developing Calverley Plain as the rest of the Gardens were expanded by one of his contemporaries William Willicombe. Willicombe’s villas were built with red brick with stone quoins and are quite a contrast to Decimus’s work in traditional white stone.

A view of Baston Cottage.

Baston Cottage and Lodge backed onto large pleasure grounds, and the large and imposing stone walls you see when driving or walking along Calverley Road towards the Prospect Road junction are the retaining walls for this parkland. They were laid out with various evergreens and flowers with meandering paths in between them taking the visitor on a peaceful country walk right in the centre of town. Alas over the course of time this parkland was gradually incorporated into the private plots of the neighbouring villas to give them larger gardens. You can still see several bricked up entrances to the pleasure grounds as you walk/drive along.

Sadly, Decimus's “Cottage Ornée”, Baston Cottage and Baston Lodge were demolished over a century ago. The land has been built on several times since but a small remnant of the stone walling of Baston Cottage still remains today. If you pop along to have a look take note of the boot scraper that the great man might have used to scrape the Calverley Plain construction site mud from his boots.

Details of the last remaining remnants of Baston Cottage.

This period signalled the end of the New Town’s construction but this is not where our series ends though. Stay tuned and we shall go and explore some more of the smaller but equally as interesting details.

Meals on Wheels

Snow has forced us to take a small break from our Calverley New Town Series this week. To cheer everyone up I thought I would regale you with a small story about how good things can come from the horrid snow conditions we have this week. Well first a nice picture and then a story.

Snow covered grasses in Dunorlan Park.

Back in the post-war year of 1947, Britain was being crushed by the frosty hands of Mother Nature as ice and snow covered the whole country. I'm sure trains ran though, but that's another story. After the war the country was left exhausted and the coal and electricity crisis, in which the commodity was rationed, made conditions very harsh. The bitter winter conditions lasted from January until March and it got so bad that men had to use pneumatic drills to clear the roads of compacted ice.

At this time the Assembly Hall was being used as an emergency care station to look after those who could not heat their homes or cook a hot meal. A story goes that one poor old lady was attempting to boil an egg in a tin saucepan over an oil lamp but resigned after twenty minutes.

A young Miss Leonora Hayne from Langton Green was serving in the Red Cross and Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) at this time and, upon hearing these sad stories, remembered seeing the wives of miners in Wales collecting hot meals and delivering them to the elderly residents stranded up in the frozen hills. This gave her an idea, could she do the same to help those stuck inside their cold homes in Tunbridge Wells?

The ladies of the WVS delivering their meals on wheels.

Miss Hayne gathered together a few local ladies from the Women's Voluntary Service, who were already used to feeding the masses in emergency conditions, and began ordering food from the British Restaurant in Calverley Grounds. They then would drive the food around to those in need. The food was also declared off-ration which meant that it wouldn't be counted against your points in your ration books. Two meals a week were served at a cost of a shilling, or about £1.50 in today's money.

This was the very first service of its kind in the whole country and was very quickly adopted country-wide. The service still runs today and is called Meals-on-Wheels. Wikipedia states that the service was invented in Hemel Hempstead of the same year. Sorry Hertfordshire, but Tunbridge Wells invented Meals-on-Wheels.

Please give a thought to some of your elderly neighbours and pop around to see if any need anything.

Calverley New Town: Calverley Crescent

In 1826 John Ward acquired over 500 acres of mainly farmland that was to become the Calverley Estate, and he directed his architect, Decimus Burton, to produce plans for its development. We learnt of Calverley Park, which was the first of the main developments, in a previous post, but surely one can't write a series about Calverley New Town without evoking images of Calverley Crescent, or as it was originally called, Calverley Promenade.

Calverley Crescent today.

The original plans for the site were for a curved structure of stables with enough room for 64 horses with four large houses occupying the land behind. But, following a change of plan a few years later, this proposal was dropped in favour of a row of seventeen elegant shops with convenient private residences above them. Decimus's concept was to create a shopping parade for the New Town to eclipse the now ageing Pantiles and he designed its long curvaceous colonnade to emulate it, even down to the pillars and 18th Century windows.

Calverley Crescent in 1860 etching by Rock & Co., notice the central library and fountain.

The Promenade was built between 1830 and 1835 from locally quarried milky-white sandstone with a roofed walkway being held up ever so delicately by thin white iron pillars. In the afternoon light the newly built structure would have been a wonderfully dazzling sight to behold. The walkway was also given a raised elevation so that it created a commanding view over the Park.

The well-to-do ladies of Calverley would waft from shop to shop in their finest gowns sheltered from the sun or rain underneath the elegant canopied roof. To give their shopping experience a more aristocratic feel, an orchestra playing on the Promenade's semi-circular bandstand would serenade them as they strolled. A fountain was also laid out on the green which would provide a peaceful soundtrack during the musical off-season. It really was the most fashionable place in town to shop and the height of good taste to be seen there.

Today the promenade is home to relaxing seating and pot plants.

So, what businesses were on the Promenade?

The most striking of the originally designed features was the central library, complete with billiard room above, called the Royal Calverley Library and Reading Room. Here, for a small annual fee, you could borrow books and music, read the newspapers or even hire a piano and a globe if you so wished.

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At No.1 was the Royal Baths, so called due to its royal patronage of the Duchess of Kent and her daughter Princess Victoria. Here you could partake in a number of tempting treatments including shampooing, aromatic baths, sulphur baths, borage baths, nitro-muriatic acid baths, douches and showers. You will notice if you cast your gaze skywards that this building has one more chimney than the other houses, this was to vent the pore-cleansing steam of the mineral and vapour baths, and according to rumour the Turkish bath is still down there in the basement.

There was Miss Lucas's Fancy Goods shop at No.2, Estate Agents at No.6 and No.17, and an Ornamental Painter at No.5.

Mr and Mrs Davis's Tailor shop at No.13 provided all one would need in millinery and dresswear of the time.

Wise's Tunbridge Ware Manufactory had a retail outlet on the Promenade, specialising in Tunbridge Ware and print publishing.

No.7 housed the Royal Victoria Bazaar, selling grooming merchandise such as shaving cakes, cologne, toothpicks and teeth. Yes, teeth!

This meagre handful of shops was all that managed to fill the seventeen spaces of the Promenade though because within just a couple of years the promenade as a shopping destination began to fall out of favour.

Some details of the Promenade's roof, notice how delicate the pillars are.

It wasn't long before the buildings begun being taken over by lodge-keepers, the band stopped playing on sunny days and the fountain stopped flowing. After a few more years just the Baths, the Library and Mrs Cockson’s Catholic Bookstore remained and the rest of the crescent had been converted to residential space. By 1847 just the Royal Baths remained.

It was said at the time that the reason for this decline was that it became a little too popular with "outsiders" so the well-heeled simply shopped on The Pantiles instead. What's not known though is who these outsiders were and from how far they came. It is more likely that these shops, like today, are just a little too far from the main shopping areas of town.

Plan of Calverley Promenade, note the bandstand on the green.

Today the pediment of the library has gone, as has its signage, as have any shops, but it has lost none of its charm and beauty. Now this long curvaceous colonnade is completely residential and highly sought-after. It’s just a pity that the pretty side doesn’t get seen as much as it should.