In 1995, two fine houses from the beginning of the nineteenth century were carefully restored. They are in Park Village East and can be seen from the Gloucester Road Bridge, at the top of Parkway. The first two houses in the road, they were built in the 1830s but, owing to the unusual pattern of short-term tenancies, very few changes had been made to them over a hundred and seventy years. Perhaps officers in the Barracks nearby leased them for short periods and then moved on, forming a moving tenancy. The houses had been just patched, so that they survived in almost their original form. This, and the fact that the buildings are listed Grade II, meant that they had to be restored with care and made it possible for them to be examined closely.
The modern view from Gloucester Road Bridge is a puzzle. The bridge, elaborately built with trefoil, terracotta sides, bridges only a shallow trench. The houses stand in a slight valley and the gardens go down in steps. Originally, the houses were built with short rear gardens, immediately above a tow path and a Navigable Cut. This Cut was a branch canal from the Regent’s Canal to Cumberland Basin. It was all part of John Nash’s plan for Cumberland Basin to replace the original Haymarket, just south of Piccadilly Circus. This had become valuable housing land, so a replacement was required and Cumberland Basin was ideally positioned for bringing in hay by barge. Robert Bevan painted the hay carts in Cumberland Market several times.
During the Second World War the Navigable Cut was filled in with bomb debris, so that the Cut and the Cumberland Basin ceased to function. After the War, the Crown gave the pieces of canal bed and tow path behind the different houses to the house-holders. Thus their rear gardens took on a three-stepped form – garden, tow-path and canal bed. Over half a century these unusual gardens have matured and trees planted immediately after 1945 are now well grown. The rear of the houses continues to be ‘picturesque’, in the fashion of the late eighteenth century. From the Gloucester Road bridge, which now spans a shallow wooded valley instead of a canal, the houses could be on some Bavarian hillside.
The History
Nash’s Regent’s Park development incorporated an entire range of house sizes and styles. Within the Park were large villas set in their own grounds for the very rich, and imposing stucco terraced palaces for the wealthy. Outside the Park were middle class villas in Park Village and the markets and barracks, each with their working class housing, near the Cumberland Basin. It was built as a complete new town on the edge of London. Park Village, Camden Town, Harlow – New Towns will be a theme of this book.
John Nash saw the romantic possibilities of the new Regent’s Canal which was being built around the northern edge of his new Regent’s Park. On the way to the new hay market which he was planning in Cumberland Basin, would be a secluded, peaceful valley bordering the canal. He envisaged a pretty ‘village’ on its banks, as an annexe to his noble Corinthian terraces in Regent’s Park itself. In stucco, with tall windows leading out to wooded gardens overlooking the canal. On the edge of London, they would be the equivalent of Blaize Hamlet, which Nash had already built on the outskirts of Bristol in 1810.
He wrote to the Office of Woods and Forests:-
‘ — These 2 plots being without the pale of the park and in the vicinity of the Barracks are only calculated for houses of the smallest class (4th rate houses) and it has occurred to me that if they were considered together as one plot of ground and the Houses, though small, scattered about in an irregular manner as Cottages with plantations between them, a very delightful Village might be formed through which the Canal would pass, and if arranged with Taste and the Buildings truly partake of the Cottage Character, the whole would be an ornamental feature and command, though humble, yet the better class of people who require such small buildings.’
Thus there would be two villages, East and West, separated by the Canal. Many years later, before the Second World War, a ferryman with a small stone hut on the towpath used to ferry people from one bank to the other. By then the canal was so quiet that kingfishers nested in the bank, and there can have been so little demand for the ferryman’s services. He must have taken on the traditional role of the hermit in a eighteenth century Romantic landscape. John Nash would have savoured that.
The two villages were built over a period of about fifteen years, the earliest houses by Nash and the later ones by his stepson Pennethorne. In the event the designs were altered from the ‘humble cottages’ first mentioned to larger, middle-class residences. More closely packed and in more orderly rows than his first layout suggested, they soon became popular.
Architectural historians have tended to be interested almost exclusively in the villas at the north end of street, those designed by Nash himself. John Summerson describes them as ‘a quaint set of variations on the styles, starting at the north with Nos. 2 and 4, castellated Tudor, going on to the broad-eaved Italian (Nos. 6 and 8), and then something with eaves of the sort usually considered Swiss, then various versions of the classical vernacular and so rapidly descending to the nondescript’.
Nos. 6 and 8 Park Village East were built in 1824, while Nos. 2 and 4, which had been planned and leased at the same date, were not built until the 1830s. Thus the latter are probably not the work of Nash, but of Pennethorne.
Originally each house had only a narrow garden, with the towpath and canal below. Thus when the first tenants moved into the houses their furniture and probably they themselves, with their children and servants, pots and pans and the remains of yesterday’s dinner, may have arrived by canal. One of Pickford’s barges could have brought them from far away, tied up immediately below the house and the men carried in the furniture through the garden doors.
The York and Albany public house, named after the dukedoms of George III’s second son, Frederick Augustus, was built between 1824 and 1826, but when the railway came in the 1830s, it ceased to be a Picturesque country pub on the edge of the country. Later it was extended and then completely destroyed in 1878. When the Gloucester Road Bridge was rebuilt on a northern alignment, to straighten out the connection with Parkway, a new York and Albany was built in glazed Doulton Ware. About 1900 a Riding Academy was built at the rear of the pub. This was later taken over by the London Zoo as a quarantine building, so that giraffes overtopping the fences, the roaring of wild cats and the screeching of parrots, added a bizarre touch to the area.
Park Village West, being nearer the Park and away from the railway, had always been better regarded than Park Village East, which was to develop a rather unsavoury reputation about the turn of the century, as Gillian Tindall has recorded. The Booth Survey of Poverty, of 1889, had some hard things to say, as will be seen in that chapter. However, most of the houses were respectably occupied during the 1880s.
The most famous occupant of No. 4 Park Village East was Sidney Webb. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, founders of the London School of Economics and early members of the Labour movement, first started corresponding in 1881. Sidney Webb, still trying to establish himself as a journalist, lived with his father at No 4 from 1890 until his marriage in 1892. For years Beatrice had had to nurse her father in distant Minchinhampton and it was not until his death that she felt free to marry. Thus some of Sidney’s letters were addressed to her from Park Village. When they married they took a lease on a house, 41 Grosvenor Road, Pimlico, on the Embankment, ‘with a wide view across the river to Lambeth Palace and St Paul’s,’ but apparently they still retained some control over No 4 Park Village East.
The picturesque effect of Park Village East was partly destroyed when the four-track line of the London and North-Western Railway was widened between 1900 and 1906. One side of Park Village East was demolished and a huge retaining wall built. From Hampstead Road, Park Village now looks like some distant hill-top village seen glistening in the sun, across the great valley of railway tracks. For years the road was a cul-de-sac and children could ride horses there in safety, but there is now a connection across the railway bridge, with Hampstead Road.
From 1903-1912 No 4 was used as the headquarters of a Yeomanry regiment. After the First World War the lease was taken by Mrs Ethyl Mary Wood, the then recently widowed daughter of Quintin Hogg and sister of the first Viscount Hailsham. Mrs Wood, a progressive woman in her own right, was a governor of Regent Street Polytechnic, which had been founded by her father, and was awarded a CBE in 1920.
A Regent’s Park Villa: Grove House, now Nuffield Lodge
The branch canal was filled in with bomb debris, so that today there appears to be no reason for a bridge at Gloucester Road. From the Regent’s Park side of the bridge it could be a mere ‘folly’, put up by some landscape gardener like Repton, to close off a view or by Nash himself designed it, to keep the outside world away from his exclusive Regent’s Park estate. Today the bridge rises only a couple of metres above the turf, but up to 1941 it was a canal bridge like all the others, standing high above the canal.
Some people can remember as children being perched on the parapet of the bridge to see the barges go past. Far below was the water, with grimy boat children waving back – children who lived in a different world, travelling on long voyages to distant towns and bringing their mysterious cargoes back to Cumberland Basin. Children who walked familiarly with horses, seldom going to school, living a wandering life far removed from settled Camden Town. These were children of romance.
One can stand there on Gloucester Road Bridge, at the junction with Albany Street, with the traffic swirling behind, and look over into the wooded valley of the canal. These peaceful Pennethorne houses seem unaffected by the din. It is Osbert Lancaster’s ‘Drayneflete Revealed’, come to life.
Local children played by the canal and swam in it. From above, gentlemen threw in pennies for the brave boys to dive for and clapped when they came to the surface again, holding up the coin in triumph. If someday the land below the bridge is excavated, a careful archaeologist will find the old towpath and the canal bed lined with puddled clay. In the silt above there may be a few pennies which were never retrieved, old bicycles, stolen purses emptied of their contents, a knife, or some other instrument which could once have been a murder weapon.
The houses are very handsome in their cream stucco and elegant, tree-filled setting. The rooms are large, with generous windows and white painted shutters, the typical construction before the Victorians brought in their heavy hanging curtains. Some of the rooms have narrow lancet windows, set sometimes rather oddly and designed to be ‘read’ from the outside of the building, not the inside.
Source: Local Local History