The Gardens of No 32 Sussex Square Kemp Town Brighton
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Institute of Historical Research MA Garden and Landscape History Student Number: 1645315 Date of submission: 2 February 2017 Word count: 5266 The gardens of No 32 Sussex Square Kemp Town Brighton Figure 1. OS Brighton & Hove Explorer map 122, scale 1:25000, 2009, showing location of Sussex Square and Kemp Town Contents Page ____________________________________________________________________________ Introduction 3 The development of Kemp Town 4 Enlargement of the gardens 6 First occupiers of No 32 6 Garden walls 7 Plants and planting 9 Sale in 1900 11 Tunnels and cellars 13 Pavilion, conservatory and glasshouses 15 Ownership after 1900 17 1950 onwards 19 Conclusions 21 Bibliography 24 2 Introduction This research focuses on the gardens of No 32 Sussex Square, a large terrace house within Kemp Town, a late Regency development in east Brighton (Fig. 1). Today only the back garden to the 8 flats making up number 32, together with a piece of land across the road, called the Secret Garden, remain (Fig. 2). The Trustees of the Antony Dale Trust, who own the Secret Garden wanted background information about the origins of the garden to use in promotional material and this was the original goal. An understanding of the development of the gardens, however, required consideration of the whole block from 32 to 40 as their histories are intertwined and this determined the scope of this exercise. Figure 2. The original extent of the garden (red) and what is left today (green). North to the left. Image: Google Earth, 2015 The key questions surround the acquisition of land east of Bristol Place for ‘extended’ gardens for No 32 and its neighbours (Fig. 3). This land was not originally designated for gardens and no other parts of Kemp Town have such large rear gardens, except where individuals bought land specifically for that purpose. Given that the gardens were unusually large for that area, how were they laid out and utilised? Who owned them and what led to the break-up of the individual parts of the garden? Why are large parts of the gardens sunken and how were the two parts connected? These are some of the key questions explored here. 3 Figure 3. Schematic plan showing position of No 32 and its gardens, the land bought for the ‘extra’ gardens and the surrounding roads (old names in brackets). Image: author 2017 The development of Kemp Town Kemp Town, a prestigious development of large houses for the gentry and aristocrats of the day, was the brain child of Thomas Read Kemp. He inherited land and wealth from his father and had experience of earlier Brighton developments. His inspiration is thought to have come from John Nash’s Regents Park estate in London.1 Kemp’s spatial idea for Kemp Town combined a very long Regency façade made up of a square, a crescent and two terraces with views out to sea. He commissioned architects Henry Amos Wilds and Charles Busby to draw up designs which they subsequently exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1825.2 In October 1824 the Brighton print dealer, James Bruce, made an engraving of their designs (Fig. 4).3 This is taken by many experts to depict the original plan for 250 houses on the estate. However, others argue it is simply ‘a developer’s puff’, just a marketing ploy, and suggest that the original plan was only for 105 houses in the principal facade.4 A plan version of Bruce’s engraving subsequently appeared in several town maps of the 1820s and is frequently reproduced in academic papers.5 These two images show additional squares to the east and west of Sussex Square, one of which is sited where the ‘extra’ gardens for Nos 32-40 were later created (Fig 4). 4 Figure 4. Plans for Kemp Town. Top: J. Bruce engraving, 1824; bottom: detail from Pigot-Smith town map, 1826. Area for ‘extra’ gardens shown in red. Image courtesy of Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove Work started in 1822 when Kemp had over 200 workmen levelling the site and digging out chalk for the basements.6 The land slopes downwards from north- west to south-east so it would have been a significant task to prepare for building work to start. The plots for the houses needed to be dug out by at least 10-20ft to allow for the slope and basements and cellars to go in. The question here is – did this preparatory phase include levelling the ground to the east of Bristol Place in readiness for the extra square? 5 In July 1824 the development was praised in the local press.7 By 1828 most of the facades and shells were in place. The carcasses remained until a purchaser was found then completed according to individual requirements,8 explaining why the rear façade for No 32 is significantly different from its neighbours. By 1831 Kemp Town was being described as ‘the most magnificent arrangement of private dwellings in the UK’.9 Enlargement of the gardens Initially sales were slow but in 1828 many transactions took place. Kemp sold carcasses to Matthias and Joseph Wilks, to Thomas Cubitt and to Nehemiah Wimble, all land owners or builders.10 Wilks owned plots 31-37 and 39-40 (Fig.5), then acquired No 38 in 1830.11 He wanted his houses to be the largest on the estate, and to go with such huge houses he wanted large gardens to provide food, services and leisure areas.12 This was probably the driver behind him acquiring the ‘extra’ land east of Bristol Place (then Sussex Mews East) from Kemp in August 1832.13 Later deeds from various part of the plot of land all refer to the same conveyance so Wilks bought the whole plot rather than individual strips. He then sold on individual strips to owners. First occupiers of No 32 The first people to move into the newly built house in December 1830 were Laurence Peel, younger brother of Robert Peel, soon to become Prime Minister, and his wife Lady Jane Peel. At that time they had very few neighbours. There were only 4 other residents in that part of Sussex Square – Thomas Reed Kemp at No 22, his sister at No 23, his brother-in-law at Nos 25/6 and Thomas MacQueen at 31.14 Numbers 19/20 were still being built as a single house for the Marquess of Bristol. The pavement and road were there at the front of the house and communal gardens, called the Enclosures, were already laid out and planted up.15 It must have been a strange mix of new gardens and ongoing building activity. At the rear of the house the coach house and stables were completed. Some form of road behind the gardens of 32-40 was there allowing access to the back of No 32 and its coach house. Their pleasure garden was about 1/3 of an acre, larger than other gardens because of its corner location. The Peels had to wait until the late 1840s & 50s for Nos 33-40 to be completed 6 and fully occupied.16 It is not clear when the Peels bought the ‘extra’ land over the road. It must have been by the end of 1832 when the walls to the new garden are known to be in place.17 Figure 5. Properties owned by Wilks in 1828, shown in brown. Image: document R/C 4/140/1, The Keep Garden walls Number 32 was the first in the block to put walls round their gardens across the road. The plot is wider than the neighbouring strips and slightly offset from the gardens adjacent to the house (Fig.7). The walls are on four sides of this substantial plot, measuring 400ft by 106ft, with a doorway in Bristol Place and an entrance in Arundel Road. The ground slopes down from the NW corner to the east and to the south, but the garden floor is level, hence the gardens are sunk below the level of the surrounding roads18. The walls are around 8ft high at 7 pavement level and considerably higher inside, up to~18ft. The west and north walls each form a retaining wall. Construction of these walls would have been a major job. Trustees of the Antony Dale Trust and others were sceptical about the walls’ provenance. At an initial glance they look like 20C breeze blocks. However, research by members of the Regency Society and the Georgian Group revealed that the walls were built by William Ranger sometime between 1830 and 1832.19 Figure 6. The inside of the walls showing the sunken garden. Image: author, 2016 Ranger was a versatile builder and worked across the fields of contracting, concrete manufacture and civil engineering as well as architecture.20 He experimented with lime-concrete and in 1827 announced in the local press that he had perfected work on his artificial stone and would use it in his next building project.21 An article in the Architectural Magazine in 1835 suggested that these particular walls were an early, if not the first use of Ranger’s Artificial stone, describing them as ‘The first work executed in this new material was a wall surrounding the garden of Mr Peel of Kemp Town’.22 The material was cast into blocks in situ and mortar of the same mix applied between each block to form a solid mass. A site visit confirmed the individual block measurements to be 2ft x 8 9.5ins x8ins as cited in the 1835 article. The idea was to achieve the appearance and durability of Portland stone at about one third of the cost.