Calverley Grounds
Mount Pleasant House and the Calverley Estate
Calverley Grounds was originally part of the Mount Pleasant
House estate built by Lord Egmont around 1762. In 1825 wealthy
developer John Ward bought the house and land as part of his
Calverley Estate, on which his architect Decimus Burton was to
create a new town to rival the old village centred on the Pantiles.
The Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria rented the house as
holiday accommodation for their visits in 1826-28 and 1834.
Calverley
Park
The grounds of Mount Pleasant House were next to and always
closely associated with John Ward's private estate of Calverley
Park, which formed the centrepiece of Burton's development.
Calverley Park consisted of twenty-four individually designed
villas, set well apart in spacious gardens, fronted by a crescent
of private pleasure grounds. Work began in 1829 and continued until
around 1837. Ward and Burton were inspired by the rus in urbe or
'country in the town' concept, and aimed to provide the residents
of their new town with the same spacious environment as the
inhabitants of the older town enjoyed by reason of their proximity
to the Common or the Grove. Their eloquent propagandist John
Britton in 1832 describes the Calverley Park villas as 'placed in
the midst of a park, which is most pleasantly disposed by nature
and adorned by art'.
The Calverley Hotel
Royal patronage prevented any immediate work on the old Mount
Pleasant House, but in the mid 1830s it was rebuilt to Decimus
Burton's designs and opened in 1840 as the Calverley Hotel. The
grounds were retained in their original state as an informal open
space, consisting of meadows with a scattering of trees and a lake
at their lowest point. Formal gardens were restricted to the
immediate vicinity of the hotel, outside the present park
boundaries.
Although the site has been much altered since those times, it is
interesting that some of the original flora and fauna of the meadow
lands has survived to the present day, including grassland
butterflies and two nationally notable mining bees.
Transforming the grounds into a public park
The separation of the park from the hotel and its development
into a public garden and recreation ground has a long and complex
prehistory. As early as 1864, private enterprise proposed a summer
and winter garden and an aquarium, with an entrance on the later
Great Hall site opposite the station. This would have placed much
of the park under a magnificent glass house.
In 1894 the Tradesmen's Association lobbied the Council to
acquire the park for a summer and winter garden, but in the
following year attention was diverted to the possibility of a
public pleasure garden at Warwick Park. This didn't happen, and by
1911 both the Council and Tradesmen's Association were agreed on a
policy of acquiring the Calverley Hotel park. Negotiations were
opened with the Calverley Estate, but came to nothing. In 1919 the
Council again declared itself in favour of a public park in the
town centre area, and the Town Clerk was instructed to explore the
available possibilities.
In 1920 the Ministry of Health held a public enquiry, at which
purchase of the park was supported by the Tradesmen's Association
and Advertising Association and opposed by the Ratepayers'
Association. The decision was in the Council's favour, and purchase
of the park and the Great Hall from the Calverley Estate was
completed early in 1921.
Developing the park
From the beginning that the Council's policy was to transform
the old informal landscape by the creation of formal gardens,
sports facilities, and provision for public entertainments. A
temporary bandstand was installed at an early date so that concerts
could begin in the summer. In the autumn, Robert Wallace of the Old
Gardens was commissioned to prepare a general scheme for laying out
the park, but it was decided not to implement this immediately, and
in the event development proceeded by stages without an overall
plan over the next five or six years. The Civic Association
commented in 1945 that 'our grounds seem to have accumulated an
assortment of random features with the same inconsequence as the
Victorian drawing room absorbs aspidistras and china
shepherdesses'.
Through the winter of 1921-22 tennis courts were laid out by
labourers paid from the Mayor's Unemployment Fund, and later in the
second year a thatched pavilion was built to service them. A
bowling green followed in 1923, also created by unemployed labour,
along with terracing on the north side of the park. The next year
saw the construction of a bowls pavilion and tea house, and the
installation of ornamental iron work including gates at the main
entrance from Mount Pleasant. An entrance lodge and a series of
ornamental lamp standards were added in 1925.
The Burmese Bell
The laying out of shrubberies and flower beds, including an
'Italian garden', was carried on in a piecemeal fashion, mostly in
the period between 1924 and 1926. The Burmese bell bequeathed by
Sidney Sladen was installed in the 'Italian' or rose garden in
1935, for which a sundial had already been presented by Councillor
Hempson in 1924. A bank for floral motifs by the Mount Pleasant
entrance was introduced in 1951. This site was used in 1987 for the
erection of a memorial to Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding, who lived
in Calverley Park.
The Pavilion and Bandstand
In the autumn of 1922, the Council organised a competition to
design an ambitious concert pavilion with an integral bandstand on
one side, which would be large enough to seat two thousand people.
However, the local political climate was unfavourable to such a
scheme, which became the subject of one of the regular battles
which had raged since 1901 between the 'progressives', led by the
Tradesmen's Association, who promoted projects to enhance the
town's prestige and prosperity, and their implacable opponents, the
Ratepayers' League, who were determined to keep public expenditure
as low as possible in the interests of established residents. Both
sides enjoyed support on the Council. As a result, although there
were forty entries in the competition, and a winner was selected,
the Council decided not to proceed but to look for a less expensive
option. As an interim measure, a bandstand adorned with ornamental
ironwork was erected in 1924, and work on a matching pavilion to
provide covered accommodation for concert audiences began in the
following year. The new pavilion was opened by the Mayor in April
1926.
Calverley Grounds during World War II
Sadly, the new pavilion survived only until 1940, when on the
night of 26 September it was destroyed by an incendiary bomb during
an air raid. The bandstand was also damaged, and its ironwork and
copper roof were sold for scrap metal. At the time, it was intended
that these facilities should be promptly replaced at the end of the
war. The Civic Association's detailed and ambitious scheme for
post-war development, commissioned by the Council in 1942 and
published in 1945, presented plans for an elegant amphitheatre, its
stage backed by a new pavilion; on the other side of the pavilion
would have been a 'pond garden', reintroducing the lost water
feature of the nineteenth century park. Unfortunately, no one had
anticipated the severe and long-lasting financial constraints of
the post-war period. Despite the availability of funding from the
War Damage Commission, plans for a new pavilion and bandstand were
repeatedly postponed and finally abandoned altogether in 1959.
Calverley Grounds in the late twentieth century
Subsequent events have included the removal and sale in 1966 of
the attractive original lamp posts, disused for some years, and the
theft of the Burmese bell in 1965 and its equally mysterious return
to the site in the following year. In 1969 its guardian figures
were replaced by similar ones spotted in a local antique shop. More
recently, the bell was removed to the safety of the Town Hall, due
to deterioration caused by vandalism and exposure to the weather.
The tea-house was burned down in 1997, and replaced by a virtual
replica in the following year.
Calverley Grounds today
Find out
more about Calverley Grounds
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Grounds to museum@tunbridgewells.gov.uk