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Category Archives: Norwich parks

Chapel in the Fields

15 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich buildings, Norwich history, Norwich parks

≈ 24 Comments

Tags

chapelfield gardens, Norwich gardens

Over the years Norwich’s largest public green space has been known as Chapel-in-the-Fields, Chapel Fields, Chapple/Chapply/Chaply/Chapley Field, and now Chapelfield Gardens [1]; my daughters call it Chappy. We saw the area last when genteel Georgians promenaded around its triangular walk [2] but this only occupied a thin slice of time for the name goes back a further half millennium to when John le Brun founded the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Fields (1250). This evolved into the College of St Mary in the Fields, part of which was to be incorporated into the Georgian Assembly House (1745-6).

Braun and Hogenberg’s prospect of Norwich 1581. The inset focuses on Chapel Fields, from St Stephen’s Gate (far right) to St Giles’ Gate (lower left). Courtesy of Norfolk County Council.

Braun and Hogenberg’s prospect of 1581 is based on Cuningham’s map of 1558 so provides a glimpse of Chapel Field around the time of Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries. In 1569 the ownership of Chapel Field was transferred to the city. The map shows this sector dominated by two areas of open ground: the land behind Chapel Field House and a triangular meadow grazed by cows and occupied by figures with bows and arrows. This was at a time when it was still compulsory for men between the ages of 15 and 60 to prepare for war and we see them practicing archery under the walls. But warfare was changing and by the latter part of the century the field became the mustering ground for the city’s trained artillerymen.

By the time of King’s plan of 1766 the two parts were still largely open ground. Only minor inroads were made by the bowling green, theatre and Assembly House, which provided entertainment for leisured Georgians. On the triangular field we see the double row of elms that lessee Thomas Churchman’s planted for his promenade [2]. This latter portion would survive as present-day Chapelfield Gardens.

The two portions of Chapel Fields: Assembly House (blue star) and Churchman’s triangular promenade (note the ‘Water House’, circled).Samuel King’s plan 1766. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council

A generation later, Chapel Fields still embodied a sense of bucolic openness as conveyed in the etching by John Crome (1768-1821). The city had always allowed Chapelfield to be used as a public space and in 1656 resisted Lady Hobart’s attempt to prevent citizens passing through [3]. Infilling with shanty housing was the norm in the rest of the city but the only signs of encroachment on rustic Chapelfield are the post-and-rail fencing and the high wall to the left (possibly part of the city wall) .

‘View in Chapel-Field’ by John Crome (etching). Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Collections NWHCM: 1954.138.Todd 7. Mancroft 118

From the beginning of the eighteenth century the fields were fenced in [3]. In 1867 the council erected iron railings [4], which would be removed in World War Two, purportedly to make guns. This would have been the ‘massive palisade’ supplied by W S Boulton (later of Boulton & Paul) who, ‘produces every kind of railing … also mincing and sausage machines’ [5].

Chapel Fields lies in the crook of the protective arm provided by the city walls, built about 1300. Some 500 years later the gates at its southern and western extremities were demolished to ease the flow of horse-drawn traffic: St Giles’ Gate in 1792 and St Stephen’s Gate a year later. The walls were disappearing too, signifying a loosening of the hold of the medieval past and allowing – if only notionally – the escape of noxious air. In the 1860s, some of the wall around Chapelfield was used as hardcore for the new Prince of Wales Road that connected the markets with the newly arrived railway [6]. Some of the ‘Chapelfield’ wall had been breached by houses built against them.

From inside Chapelfield Gardens. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

In 1969, these houses were demolished to make way for the ring road [7].

The City Wall outside Chapelfield Gardens following demolition of attached houses in 1969. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

King’s map of 1766 shows a water house within Churchman’s triangular walk, part of the corporation’s scheme to supply water to the city. Water pumped from the river at New Mills (near Westwick Street, upstream of the built-up area) supplied Chapelfield and Tombland. The Tombland works were described in 1698 by Celia Fiennes as ‘a great well house with a wheele to wind up the water … a large pond walled up with brick a mans height … (and) a water house to supply the town by pipes’ [quoted in 8]. This is commemorated by John Henry Gurney’s obelisk and fountain of 1850.

JH Gurney’s fountain and obelisk commemorate a previous water cistern. This memorial was relocated in the recent (2021) transformation of Tombland.

Supply of unfiltered water was therefore restricted to a few parts of the city – and then only to those who would pay for the connection. In 1792, supply was taken over by the Norwich Waterworks Company who built the water tower and reservoir in Chapel Field that appear on Millard and Manning’s map of 1830 [9].

The Chapelfield reservoir on Millard and Manning’s map 1830. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council.

The presence of waterworks in Chapelfield had disturbed the illusion of a bosky retreat where the gentility could associate and by 1840 the park had become ‘the resort of loose and idle boys’ and washerwomen [9]. One idea had been to dignify the site by placing a statue of Nelson on an island in the middle of the reservoir [3]. This never happened and the statue was located, instead, in the cathedral’s Upper Close.

Print by JW Papworth of Thomas Milnes’ statue of Nelson, intended to be placed upon a fountain pedestal in Chapel Field. Courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service NWHCM: 1954.138.Todd7.Mancroft168

In 1852 the Waterworks Company agreed to hand the land over to the corporation provided they laid it out as a public garden, which they did. By designating Chapelfield Gardens a public park the site was protected from the terraced housing being built just the other side of the city wall.

In 1866 the corporation offered the north-west corner of Chapelfield Gardens to the militia for building a drill hall [5]. This castellated Neo-Gothic building, designed by the City Surveyor, Ernest Benest, incorporated part of a tower from the old city wall. The triangular shape of Chapelfield Gardens would be lost when this corner, and the Drill Hall, were flattened beneath the inner ring road of the C20.

Postcard depicting the Old Drill Hall on the site of the present-day roundabout, with Chapelfield Gardens to the left. The tower incorporated from the city wall is marked with a dotted line. Courtesy of Wikipedia

From within this lost north-west corner of Chapelfield Garden we see the back of the Drill Hall and beyond this the Catholic Cathedral, only just completed in 1910. And those must be Mr Boulton’s sturdy iron railings, removed in World War II.

‘The lost corner’. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

The Drill Hall was demolished in 1963 but the position of the old city-wall tower incorporated into its structure is commemorated by a semi-circle of cobbles on the Grapes Hill roundabout, constructed as part of the 1968-1975 Inner Link Road.

Grapes Hill roundabout from the Catholic cathedral tower, with semi-circle of cobbles (inset) marking the ‘Drill Hall’ tower. The dotted line follows the medieval wall. ©norwich.gov.uk [10].

To connect the roundabout with incoming traffic from Earlham Road – which had previously gone straight across to St Giles Street – an awkward fiddler’s elbow (yellow) was created when vehicles were diverted a little way up Unthank Road. Traffic was reconnected with St Giles Street via a spur off the roundabout, creating Cleveland Road (green) in the process. It probably made sense at the time.

Left: contemporary map courtesy of OrangeSmile.com. Right: 1908 OS map courtesy of National Library of Scotland. Blue, drill hall. Green, Cleveland Street. Yellow, Earlham Road traffic re-routed up Unthank Road.

George Plunkett’s invaluable archive of twentieth century photographs shows us the Earlham Road/St Giles Street intersection before the map was redrawn in the late 1960s. Here we look down the narrow street that appears as St Giles Hill on the 1884 OS map and as Grapes Hill in 1908. This was some 60 years before the houses were demolished in readiness for the dual carriageway and the pedestrian flyover built over it. To the far left, at No 1 Earlham Road, is the eponymous Grapes Hotel. It was the only building on the hill to survive the ring road but it was to give way to retirement homes built around 2000. I can recall being able to touch the upper floor of the former Grapes Hotel from the gangway up to the footbridge.

‘St Giles Hill. View north from St Giles Gates, 1964′. © georgeplunkett.co.uk.

Inside the gardens, one of its most exotic inhabitants was the iron pavilion designed by Thomas Jeckyll. Made by Barnard Bishop and Barnards, and with much of the bas-relief work being forged by Aquila Eke (George Plunkett’s great uncle) it won a gold medal at the Philadelphia exhibition of 1876. Four years later it was bought by the Norwich corporation for £500 and installed in Chapelfield Gardens. I’ve written at length about Aesthetic Jeckyll and his designs for Barnards’ Norfolk Iron Works [e.g., 11], so I won’t run on, but this was the famous ‘Pagoda’, enclosed by railings in the form of uber-fashionable sunflowers – an icon of the Japanese-influenced Aesthetic Movement, here in provincial Norwich. Yet, despite it being a triumph of Norwich craftsmanship, the modernists who wrote the City of Norwich Plan for 1945 judged the Pagoda to be dispensable and so it was demolished in 1949. As Gavin Stamp wrote in Lost Victorian Britain, ‘Victorian, quite simply, was a term of abuse’ during the post-war period.

Norwich’s lost treasure, The ‘Pagoda’. Sunflower railings, arrowed. Courtesy of Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

Designed by Jeckyll, the fabric hangings that once decorated the Pagoda are conserved in the Norwich Castle Study Centre.

Courtesy of Norfolk County Council

Another occupant of Chapelfield Gardens was a thatched teahouse, known as King Prempeh’s Bungalow, built about the time of the Ashanti campaign in West Africa. Prempeh the First (1870-1931), who had tried to negotiate peace with the British, was captured by an expeditionary force led by Robert (‘Scouting for Boys’) Baden-Powell and sent into exile. In 1902, the Ashanti Kingdom became part of the Gold Coast colony. When Prempeh – once ruler of all he surveyed – was eventually released he found himself Chief Scout of what was now a British protectorate [12].

The thatched teahouse in 1931. In 1938, this was replaced by the present building that for many years housed Pedro’s Mexican Restaurant ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

Surrounding Chapelfield Gardens

From about 1815 the New City arose outside the walls on the south-west side of Chapelfield Road. This signalled the start of the expansion of working-class housing away from the insanitary muddle of the old city. A piece of land once used as a market garden became Crook’s Place and along with Union Place and Julian Place these terraces of small houses were built to accommodate an influx of workers from the countryside [13]. Mostly back-to-back, these modest dwellings with shared privies and water pumps proved to be insanitary and were demolished during rounds of twentieth century slum clearance. A generation later, terraced housing on the Steward and Unthank estates was built to higher standards and continued the city’s westward expansion well beyond the pull of the medieval walls [13].

Chapelfield Gardens (yellow). Julian, Union and Crook’s Place(s) (red). The Crescent (green), Gothic House (blue star). 1886 OS map. National Library of Scotland CC-BY-NC-SA

Built better for polite society, the V-shaped Crescent (1821-1827) survives into the twenty-first century. Nearby, the distinctive Gothic House was demolished as part of the Vauxhall demolition scheme of the 1960s. The Gothic Revival, mostly encountered on Victorian non-conformist chapels around Norwich, hardly touched the city’s domestic housing; the Gothic House is a rare example of this style, here applied as a facade to an older building [14].

No 47 Chapelfield Road. The Gothic House in 1939, built 1857. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

The street bounding the gardens to the north, Chapelfield North, is architecturally rich; it hasn’t altered significantly during my 40 years in the city although the ebb and flow of traffic seems to have changed according to various schemes. One bystander that has overseen a more dramatic change in transport fashion is The Garage, now a centre for performing arts.

The Garage, Chapelfield North. The building immediately to the left is St Mary’s Croft built 1881 in exuberant Tudorbethan style.

Originally, The Garage was built as the new motor works for Howes & Sons Ltd.

Photo: howesfamilies.com

In this photograph Howes were announcing themselves as ‘coachbuilders’ at a time when coachwork had come to mean the body of a motor vehicle. But this was just a breath away from a world when Howes built horse-drawn carriages.

Howes & Sons Ltd, coachbuilders, established 1784 (from Bayne’s Comprehensive History of Norwich, 1869 [5]).

A twentieth century addition to Chapelfield North is the Norwich Spiritualist Church. Built by RG Carter in 1936, this single-storey building was part-funded by proceedings from a post-WWI spiritualist meeting addressed by the faith’s most famous adherent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The third of the triangle of streets around Chapelfield Gardens is Chapelfield East, which divides the gardens from the larger block that once housed Caley’s chocolate factory (later, Rowntree Mackintosh then Nestlé). Demolished to make way for the Chapelfield Shopping Centre (2005) this complex was – with a nod to its ecclesiastical heritage – recently renamed as Chantry Place.

On this street Chapelfield East Congregational Church once stood, a prominent landmark with twin 80-foot towers. As George Plunkett noted [15], a stranger could have been excused for thinking it was this chapel that gave name to the neighbouring public garden. Of course, it was far too young, arising in 1859 to be demolished in 1972.

Chapelfield East Congregational Church seen in 1939 ©georgeplunkett.co.uk
On St Mary’s Croft in Chapelfield North, a reminder of the chapel of St Mary in the Fields,

© 2022 Reggie Unthank

Sources

  1. Francis Blomefield (1806). ‘History of the County of Norfolk’ 4, part 2 Chapter 42 City of Norwich. Online at: https://www.british-history.ac.uk/topographical-hist-norfolk/vol4/pp145-184#h2-0003
  2. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2021/11/16/georgian-norwich/
  3. Frank Meeres (2011). The Story of Norwich. Pub: Phillimore & Co. Ltd.
  4. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001645
  5. A.D. Bayne (1869). A Comprehensive History of Norwich https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44568/44568-h/44568-h.htm
  6. Nikolaus Pevsner and Bill Wilson (1997). The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East. Pub: Yale University Press.
  7. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/cat.htm#Chafe
  8. Margaret Pelling (2004). Health and Sanitation to 1750. In, Norwich since 1550. Eds: Carol Rawcliffe and Richard Wilson. Pub: Hambledon and London.
  9. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001645
  10. https://www.norwich.gov.uk/site/custom_scripts/citywalls/21/report.php
  11. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/01/06/jeckyll-and-the-sunflower-motif/
  12. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Ashanti_wars
  13. Rosemary O’Donoghue (2014). ‘Norwich, an Expanding City: 1801-1900.’ Pub: Larks Press.
  14. Noël Spencer (1978). Norwich Drawings. Pub: Noël Spencer and Martlet Studio.
  15. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Norwich/cat.htm#Chafr

Thanks: I am grateful to Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk and to the George Plunkett collection for permission to use photographs.

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The Captain’s Parks

05 Friday Jul 2019

Posted by reggie unthank in Norwich history, Norwich parks

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Eaton Park, Heigham Park, Mile Cross Gardens, sandys-winsch, trees, Waterloo Park, Wensum Park

In the 17th and 18th centuries, visitors to Norwich were surprised at the amount of open ground within the walls of a thriving city [1]. But by the early twentieth century the city had burst its confines and green space was needed in the suburbs to counter-balance the Victorian terraces and the vast council estates that followed. This month I focus on the man who created the city’s C20 parks, generating work for the many who were still unemployed after World War I.

IMG_1058.jpeg

From “Norwich Parks: Summer Handbook” ca 1947. Starred: Eaton, Heigham, Wensum and Waterloo Parks.

From the C16 onwards, when accommodation had to be found for the influx of weavers from the Low Countries, the large houses of the rich textile merchants were subdivided into cheap tenements and their courtyards filled with shoddy speculative buildings. These ‘yards’ housed the Norwich poor and were the object of slum clearances from the late C19 to well into the C20 [2]. It was to this ‘land fit for heroes’ that soldiers returned from WWI and many found themselves out of work:

“In 1921, there was no doubt action was needed in Norwich. The City had 7000 unemployed people with another 1040 on short time, 1500 married men and 1200 single men were registered for relief work.” AP Anderson [3].

In 1919, just after he was demobbed from the Army, Captain Arnold Edward Sandys-Winsch (1888 – 1964) applied for the job as Parks Superintendent in Norwich [3].

Sandys-Winsch-tn.jpg

Courtesy of [3]

 

Before the war Sandys-Winsch had trained with landscape architect and garden designer, Thomas Hayton Mawson, whose interest in town planning and public parks is likely to have played a part in gaining Sandys-Winsch the position.

ThMawson.jpg

Thomas Mawson ©Chris Mawson

In 1900 Mawson had published The Art and Craft of Garden Making, linking his name to the Arts & Crafts approach to gardening pioneered by the partnership between gardener Gertrude Jekyll and architect Edwin Lutyens [4]. Sandys-Winsch’s designs for Norwich would emerge out of these formative influences.

Plan-from-Mawson-1900.jpg

Plan by TH Mawson, from ‘The Art and Craft of Garden Making’ (1900), courtesy of [5].

 

When The Captain was appointed, Norwich only had Chapelfield Gardens, Gildencroft, Sewell Park (funded by relatives of Anna Sewell, author Black Beauty) and the largely unreconstructed pleasures of Mousehold Heath (given to the citizens of Norwich by The Church in 1880 [6]). It was quickly suggested to Sandys-Winsch that he could put the unemployed to work by making new parks [7, 8].

In 1906, using funds provided by the Norwich Playing Fields and Open Spaces Society [7, 8], the council bought 80 acres from the Church Commissioners comprised of four large grazing fields between Eaton Hall and Earlham Hall. This rough area to the south-west of the city was at one time the site of the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Show; during WWI it served as a practice ground for trench warfare but between 1924 and 1928 Sandys-Winsch employed 103 men to transform it into Eaton Park [7,8,9].

IMG_1035.jpg

Capt Sandys-Winsch’s 1928 plan for Eaton Park [Oddly, the compass arrow points south, not true north]. The 400 yard scale bar, lower left, makes the park over a mile long. Norfolk Record Office ©Norfolk County Council

 

The ‘third field’ (red star) near Bluebell Road was left as rough grass to accommodate circuses until after WWII. Now it contains the pitch-and-putt golf course [7,8].

EPW021313.jpg

Eaton Park 1928. The ‘third field’, now the golf course, is starred.

Other recreational features included tennis courts, cricket squares, bowling greens and a model yacht pond. Eaton Park was The Captain’s prestige project and considerable effort went into the structural elements: mainly the radial plan of the large formal gardens and a centrepiece provided by quadrant pavilions surrounding a domed bandstand.

30129032934268.jpg

A colonnade being made from reconstituted stone. ©Norfolk County Council at Picture Norfolk

The park was opened in 1928 by Edward, Prince of Wales with Captain Sandys-Winsch in close attendance.

Opening NCC.jpg

The tall figure of The Captain stands behind Prince Edward with stick in hand, 1928. Photo George Swain ©Norfolk County Council. Courtesy of Archant.

A 29 second movie of this visit survives. PRESS HERE

Screenshot 2019-06-27 at 10.04.41.png

Courtesy of British Pathé

At a time when few people had cars, finances were tight and ‘holiday at home’ was the watchword, the parks enjoyed a popularity that is difficult to appreciate today. Correspondence between the Parks and Gardens Committee and the Norwich Electric Tramways Company mentions cheap fares to Eaton Park during band performances on Sundays, 2-6pm [10].

Eaton Park band playing in bandstand [B290] 1932-05-16.jpg

A military band concert in Eaton Park, 1932. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk

IMG_1074.jpg

Eaton Park bandstand today

The buildings in Eaton Park show a restrained Italianate classicism although there is said to be an Indian Mogul influence [8]. The closest approximation to an Indian structure would be the domed bandstand, which can be traced through Mawson’s designs to the dome-shaped ‘chattri’ pavilions [11] used in Indian architecture and repeatedly employed by Lutyens in his designs for New Delhi.

RIBA3080-37.jpg

From the New Delhi office of Sir Edwin Lutyens 1912, based on a model of a ‘chattri’ roof.  Courtesy RIBApix

One of the quadrant pavilions now houses the excellent Eaton Park café whose sandwiches give a humorous nod to the park’s creator.

IMG_1080.jpeg

By comparison, the menu from Sandys-Winsch’s time as Parks Superintendent seems joyless. Probably printed in the tail of post-war austerity (WWII), the no-frills tariff offered a ‘set tea’ of bread and butter with jam, a pastry and a pot of tea, enjoyed in clouds of Churchman cigarette smoke.

IMG_1065.jpg

Eaton Park Café ‘tariff’ from, I guess, the 1950s.

A dozen or so years earlier the pavilions had been used for a less happy purpose. In 1940, Britain was at war and the Council was preparing trenches in parks and gardens across the city to afford some shelter against air attack.  IMG_1047.jpg

Surface shelter in Norwich parks against bombing. Norfolk Record Office N/EN 1/73

For Eaton Park the Air Raid Precautions Committee had drawn up plans to convert the pavilions to air raid mortuaries.

IMG_1039.jpg

Plan by City Architect LG Hannaford (3.2.1940) to adapt Eaton Park Pavilion to air raid mortuaries. Norfolk Record Office N/C 1/195

North of the city, Waterloo Park was used as a temporary mortuary after two German bombers – a Dornier 17 and a Junkers 88 – dropped bombs during the first air raid in 1940 [12]. There was no warning siren; 27 were killed, including 10 at Boulton & Paul’s Riverside Works and five women on Carrow Hill who had just clocked off at Colman’s Carrow Works. By a curious twist a Dornier DO17, which had been shot down over Duxford, was displayed at Eaton Park in 1940.

Screenshot 2019-06-27 at 13.28.58.png

The Dornier ‘Flying Pencil’ displayed in Eaton Park, 1940. Courtesy of Friends of Eaton Park [3], reprinted from the Eastern Evening News ‘Letters’ Dec 5 1985. 

 

Less than a mile north-east of Eaton Park lies Heigham Park. Its survival amongst the blizzard of terraced house-building can again be attributed to the foresight of The Norwich Playing Fields and Open Spaces Society [7, 8, 13]. In what became the Golden Triangle, they had bought a large plot of land so that children at Crooks Place School (now Bignold) and the nearby Avenue Road School could take part in sports and recreation. In 1909 the mayor inaugurated Heigham Playing Fields by kicking off a soccer match between these schools [7]. But by 1920, with encroaching suburbanisation, architect George Skipper was proposing to build four terraces around half of the field while the other half remained a recreation ground for the Church of England Young Men’s Society football team – the forerunner of The Canaries. 

IMG_6098c.jpg

The fourth (upper) side of the proposed building site (red) around Heigham Park was never built, leaving The Avenues to bisect the larger field and to pass without too much of a dogleg down Avenue Road. Courtesy NRO N/EN 24/138

CEYMS.jpg

The CEYMS premises at Brigg Street, Norwich

Heigham Park, opened in 1924, was the smallest of Sandys-Winsch’s parks and the first ‘modern’ park opened in the city [7, 8]. Heigham Park had room for tennis courts, bowling green, floral beds and a general play area but lacked the large built structures that characterise Eaton Park.

IMG_1097.jpg

Heigham Park today

What it does possess is a timber pergola on stone pillars, one of Mawson’s signature features. IMG_1098.jpg

The tennis courts at Heigham Park were once distinguished by wrought iron gates with railings in the form of sunflowers designed in the 1870s by Wymondham’s Thomas Jeckyll (no relation to Gertrude). The subject of an earlier post [14], the sunflower became emblematic of the Aesthetic Movement that celebrated the impact of Japanese design upon Western art. Now, reproductions of these sunflowers form the gates at  Eaton Park and Chapelfield Gardens (and provide the header for my local history site on Twitter).Screenshot 2019-06-24 at 10.31.18.png

The original Heigham Park sunflowers were some of the 73 sunflowers, three feet six inches tall, that formed the railings around the oriental pagoda in Chapelfield Gardens. The pagoda was an exhibition piece, of international acclaim, that Jeckyll designed for Barnard Bishop and Barnards’ Norfolk Iron Works in Coslany but it was dismantled after WWII [14].

Chapelfield pagodaPixlr.jpg

The Chapelfield Pagoda. The sunflower railings can just be seen surrounding the base of the pagoda. Courtesy http://www.racns.co.uk.

In 1897 the Norwich Playing Fields and Open Spaces Association leased, from the Great Hospital Trust, land that would become Waterloo Park in the north of the city [7,8]. Originally named Catton Recreation Ground, Waterloo Park was redesigned by Sandys-Winsch and opened in 1933 [15]. This, his second largest project, was structurally more complex than Heigham Park. 

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Courtesy of Norfolk Record Office ©Norfolk County Council 

As at Eaton, this park provided for active recreation with grass tennis courts, football pitches, bowling greens and  a children’s playground. In addition, there were formal gardens (with the longest flower border in the city), pergola walks, a bandstand, a pavilion and those colonnades. IMG_1118.jpg

In 2000, AP Anderson  suggested that the ‘small central feature’ at top centre of the pavilion was not intended for a clock but a sculpture of the heads of three city’s worthies [8]. During the Heritage Lottery Fund-sponsored renovations of 1998-2001, a sculpture was commissioned of the three wise monkeys.

IMG_1119.jpg

‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.’ Artist: Alex Johanssen 2000

In 2017, after the pavilion had been closed for 15 years, it reopened as Park Britannia, a café run by serving and ex-offenders who have turned this into a popular and vibrant place to visit. Try it.

IMG_1127.jpg

The Britannia Café’s ice-cream van ‘Meghan’

Wensum Park emerged out of an abandoned project to build a swimming pool and paddling pool on the banks of the River Wensum [7,8]. After work ceased in 1910 the site became a refuse dump but in 1921, with a 40% government grant, the council set the workless to turn it into a garden park, which opened in 1925. Perhaps because of its gentle slope to the river, which made it unsuitable for playing fields, Sandys-Winsch decided to make this one of his less formal gardens. Unlike Heigham Park it did contain a building: a balustraded viewing terrace with a pavilion/shelter beneath.IMG_1108.jpg

George Plunkett’s photograph of 1931 shows that the pool and fountain have been lost, as has the paddling pool by the riverside.

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The circular pool with fountain jets, seen here in 1931. ©georgeplunkett.co.uk 

 

The last of the Sandys-Winsch Five is Mile Cross Gardens. In the 1920s Professor Adshead of Liverpool University set out a ‘modern housing estate of quality’ [7] and from the outset the gardens were an integral part. Sandys-Winsch implemented the planned twin gardens, each one-acre. While Eaton, Heigham, Waterloo and Wensum parks are Grade II* listed, Mile Cross Gardens are Grade II and, unlike the others, did not receive Heritage Lottery funding in 2000. This secondary status is reflected in the dereliction of the two small pavilions and the loss of S-W’s stone and timber pergolas (although vestigial bases remain). IMG_1136.jpg

 

Minor works: The much more substantial pavilion at Sloughbottom Park was also designed by Sandys-Winsch.IMG_1130.jpg

Probably the greatest contribution to the general wellbeing of Norwich’s citizens are the 20,000 trees that  Sandys-Winsch planted around the city’s roads. Minutes of the Parks and Gardens Committee [10] show that this was part of an unemployment scheme; one small project employed  15 men for 20 weeks [10]. In doing this the Council took advantage of Ministry of Transport grants to plant trees on Class I and II roads. Another scheme drawn up by Sandys-Winsch involved Newmarket, Aylsham and Dereham Roads (all Class I) and Earlham Road (II) at a cost of £900, £408 of which was grant-aided. The trees immeasurably improve the quality of life in this city.

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Newmarket Road

©2019 Reggie Unthank

Sources

  1. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2018/09/15/norwich-city-of-trees/
  2. Frances and Michael Holmes (2015). The Old Courts and Yards of Norwich. Pub: Norwich Heritage Projects.
  3. http://friendsofeatonpark.co.uk/captain-sandys-winsch/. (Do visit this great website).
  4. https://www.greatbritishgardens.co.uk/garden-designers/35-thomas-mawson-1861-1933.html
  5. https://merl.reading.ac.uk/news-and-views/2014/05/discovering-the-landscape-5-mawsons-the-art-craft-of-garden-making-1900/
  6. https://www.edp24.co.uk/norfolk-life-2-1786/norfolk-history/46-mousehold-heath-1-214282
  7. Geoffrey Goreham (1961). The Parks and Open Spaces of Norwich. Self-published, Norwich. Available for reference at Norwich Millennium Library.
  8. A.P. Anderson (2000). The Captain and the Norwich Parks. Pub: The Norwich Society.
  9. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001282
  10. Minutes of the Parks and Gardens Committee 1921-1928. NRO N/T 22/2
  11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chhatri
  12. http://www.georgeplunkett.co.uk/Website/raids.htm
  13. Clive Lloyd (2017). Colonel Unthank and the Golden Triangle. See colonelunthanksnorwich.com
  14. https://colonelunthanksnorwich.com/2016/01/06/jeckyll-and-the-sunflower-motif/
  15. https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1001348

Thanks. For providing photographs I am grateful to: Helen Mitchell, Friends of Eaton Park; Jonathan Plunkett of the georgeplunkett.co.uk website; Clare Everitt of Picture Norfolk; Rosemary Dixon, Archant Photo Library. Thanks, too, to Sarah Scott.

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