Anke: Royal Tunbridge Wells

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.

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.

Calverley New Town: The Lodges

Over a series of posts I thought I'd take the time to discover and share a bit about one of the most historic and dominant parts of Tunbridge Wells, Decimus Burton's Calverley New Town.

I thought I'd start the series with a look at some of the lesser known buildings, the Lodges. What were they and why were they built?

"Gatekeepers being essential for the purpose of keeping out strangers and stray animals", lodges were built at the three entrances to Calverley Park. Not only did these keep out the unwanted but it also ensured that the Park remained exclusive.

They were designed to be beautiful ornamental entrances to the Park, and it was said that the "liveried guardians of privacy, and their wives, must sometimes have rebelled at the inconvenience of a dwelling whose interior arrangements were at the mercy of a classical facade". You can see the guardsmen in the old pictures below in their uniforms, complete with splendid stovepipe hats. One only has to look at Keston Lodge's octagonal layout and Victoria Gate's spare room completely separate from the rest of the house to wonder at how they lived in such quarters.

Victoria Gate Lodge today in 2010.

Victoria Lodge
Victoria Lodge, which is probably the best known of all the lodges, is the principle entrance to the Park and was the first to be constructed as this is the end that the builders started construction of the whole of Calverley Park in the late 1820s.
The Lodge has the honour of being the first object in the world to be named after the young Princess Victoria who was a regular Summer visitor to the Wells.
The Grecian style lodge is comprised of a high Roman carriage arch with a single storey room on each side, their west fronts flanked with fluted Doric half columns supporting a heavy entablature. If you look very closely you will notice that the windows, each in moulded stone surrounds with original glazing bars, are wider at the bottom than at the top, a beautiful detail.
The road-side room of the lodge has had an additional later building with pointed roof attached to extend the living quarters, you can see the original structure in the drawing below.

Victoria Gate Lodge complete with uniformed guardian. Courtesy of John Britton's Descriptive Sketches of Tunbridge Wells and the Calverley Estate.

We can only wonder how splendid the archway looked over 180 years ago as the locally quarried sandstone would have been a wildly different colour, but alas has today faded and been weathered by the passing traffic pollution. It is said that the arch displays some of the engineerial qualities of Decimus's other archways, such as the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner.

Before the Town Hall

It's no secret that the Council are considering abandoning the current town hall site and relocating to smaller premises, which does actually make me both happy and sad. I'm happy that the current building will become something new and hopefully open to the public. I'm crossing my fingers for a giant extension of the museum and art gallery. Are you reading Mr Mayor?

I'm sad also but perhaps not for the reasons you might be thinking. It actually makes me feel sorrow for the building that once stood on the site, before the town hall existed, and ask myself if there really was a need to destroy it for the current building.

The original buildings were designed and built by the great Decimus Burton between 1827 and 1841 and I think you'll agree from the picture below that they are magnificent to behold. The Terrace consisted of four detached double villas, and a Parade of twelve houses, all faced with stone. There were pleasure grounds before each range of houses, private gardens behind, and stables and a mews beyond them. Luckily two still survive to this day, number nine and ten just tucked away next to the police station. Go have a look at them and wonder what a whole line of them would look like.

You can perhaps sympathise a bit more with my woe when you see the next photographs of workmen demolishing the row of buildings around 1938, not even a hundred years later.

Demolition in progress.

Loading up all the stone into wagons.

Decimus' great terrace is razed to the ground.

Back to the open ground of pre-1827.

The Terrace was a row of very grand houses and were palatial homes of the very wealthy people of the day, the 1881 Census showing a doctor, a retired Captain, clergyman and the rest filled with rich owners living off of dividends.

When the Terrace was built in 1827 many local residents weren't pleased with it, with several complaining to the local newspaper about the huge imposing stone walls. The residents may have had a point at the time, because even though Calverley Terrace looks beautiful to us today from these old images, when you consider what was there before Decimus put pencil to paper, it is quite a difference. For before Decimus arrived there was a lonely house sitting in a huge meadow sitting atop Mount Pleasant (see map below). The building was called Lanthorn House and was owned by some rather special people over the years, including the Reverend Gordon, rector of Speldhurst and Thomas Beeching the banker who eventually sold it to the planners for the Terrace.

Click the image above to see a larger version.

There is today a small nod to the past to the great Lanthorn House by way of a small mews lane called Lanthorne Mews. Look out for it when you next walk to the theatre.

I'll leave you with a quote I discovered "Had the town not demolished the stylish houses and villas of this town planner, Tunbridge Wells would be the tourist attraction of the South East."

Treemendous

Sleepely awakening from his long Winter nap, my favourite tree is yawning and reaching into the sky, spreading his green fingers as high as he can. Every day there seems to be hundreds more leaves of hundreds of different colours of green. Sometimes I can waste hours sitting and looking for birds nestling and flitting amongst his leaves and branches, looking ever hopeful for that owl I keep hearing twitting and twooing at night.

In the Winter I'd look through his branches at the church clock to keep time, but now in the Spring my favourite tree is in a playful mood and keeps blocking my view in the wind with his leaves, almost saying "look at me instead".

My tree always fills my view from my window all year round but come Spring he likes to stretch and provide me with a little extra shade from the sun shining on my laptop screen, but even when I am typing this, and not looking at my favourite tree, I can see his shadow projected onto the wall, he's waving his leaves at me in the breeze.

Its a lovely green fresh sight that greets me long before I get home as he peers over the top of the church ever waiting. In fact he's probably been waiting there for hundreds of years. I wonder if Decimus Burton used to gaze at him whilst building the church? Do you have a favourite tree?