British Spa Landscapes

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British Spa Landscapes

A series of 5 online talks on Tues @ 10.00 from 20th Sep exploring spa parks and gardens in Britain. £5 each or all 5 for £20.

By The Gardens Trust

Date and time

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 02:00 - 03:30 PDT

Location

Online

Refund Policy

Contact the organiser to request a refund.

About this event

A strong tradition of health tourism at spa resorts in continental Europe has identified the ‘Kurpark’ and ‘Kurgarten’ (spa parks and spa gardens), as a subtype in garden history, in which the planted environment is an integral part of the visitor experience, an important element of ‘the cure’. Of the many spas in existence at some time in Britain, landscape designed for ‘taking the waters’ has featured in a high proportion of the locations. This series of talks looks at notable examples, identifying the characteristics and influence of their planned landscape.

Image: Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham, British School (Photo credit: The Cheltenham Trust and Cheltenham Borough Council).

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This ticket is for the entire course of 5 sessions. or you may purchase a ticket for individual sessions, costing £5 via the links below.

Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days (and again a few hours) prior to the start of the first talk (If you do not receive this link please contact us), and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after each session and will be available for 1 week.

Due to a recent Apple decision to charge a 30% fee for paid online events unfortunately you may no longer be able to purchase this ticket from the Eventbrite iOS app. Please use a web browser on desktop or mobile to purchase or follow the link here.

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Week 1. 20 September: Spa gardens legacy at Bath, a World Heritage Site. First in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Week 2. 27 September: Gardens for Health Tourism 1609 -2022. Second in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Week 3. 4 October: ‘Leafy Leamington’. Third in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Week 4. 11 October: A Lost Spa Garden at Dorton Spa Buckinghamshire. Fourth in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

Week 5. 18 October: 150 years of Edward Milner’s Buxton Pavilion Garden. Last in a series of 5 online lectures, £5 each or all 5 for £20.

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Week 1. 20 September: Spa gardens legacy at Bath, a World Heritage Site with Christopher Pound

Gardens have always been an essential attribute for all European spa towns. Walking in gardens was important as a diversion from treatments at the mineral springs and baths but they also provided places of entertainment, pleasure and exercise. Bath had several pleasure gardens, but Sydney Gardens survives as the last of the Vauxhalls. Spa gardens in Bath evolved from a formal ‘baroque style’ to take on a character drawn from and influencing the fashionable ‘picturesque’. Many Continental spa towns included gardens laid out in an English informal garden style and some of these were called the ‘English Garden’. The principal gardens in Bath informed the architecture and development of the built form in the city. Eighteenth century doctors in Bath realized that leisure and exercise made an important contribution to restoring and maintaining health and so the gardens and setting of the city were essential parts of the cure and still are. Accordingly, all the gardens, green spaces, woodlands and fabric of the city with its attractive surrounding countryside are a ‘therapeutic landscape’. This is an embracing attribute for the eleven spa towns in the recent UNESCO inscription of ‘The Great Spa Towns of Europe World Heritage Site’.

Image: Therapeutic countryside just outside of Bath c.1795 J. Walker.

Chris Pound is an architect and a town planner who led teams that prepared the Development Plan, Landscape Strategy and the Conservation Team for the City of Bath and he worked on developing policies for the city following its inscription in 1987 on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Chris joined the ICOMOS-UK World Heritage Committee in 1992 and contributed to the creation of the Local Authority World Heritage Forum in 1996. Chris is a Churchill Travelling Fellow. In 1999 he examined the approaches to presentation of values at twelve World Heritage cities in Europe. In Britain, Chris contributed to the nomination of the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and Canal World Heritage Site. More recently, he contributed to the nomination of the Great Spa Towns of Europe World Heritage Site, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2021 which includes the city of Bath.

www.bathworldheritage.org.uk/great-spa-towns-europe

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Week 2. 27 September: Gardens for Health Tourism 1609 -2022 with Karen Emery

For visitors to spas, the supposed curative properties of the waters were only part of the spa experience. The facilities and ambience were also vital in choosing where to take ‘the cure’ and although a scenic location was most desirable, designed landscaping had an important part to play. A potential suite of plantings including tree-lined avenues (well walks), embellishment for pump rooms, promenade parks and pleasure gardens were used to support and promote spa visiting. This talk summarises recent research on parks, gardens and avenues directly associated with ‘taking the waters’ in British spa locations, identifying what remains long after medicinal spa visiting has declined to almost zero in this country. Illustrated with selected – and some-times surprising – examples from England, Scotland and Wales, it will also consider the extent to which remaining spa landscapes are acknowledged and portrayed as important aspects of spa heritage.As modern spas have morphed into facilities offering pampering and relaxation rather than medicinal water treatments, the talk will present the most recently designed spa garden at Carden Park in Cheshire, recognising a continuity of intent in the creation of green spaces with therapeutic value.

Image: The German spa, Brighton: pump room and surrounding grounds. Aquatint by M.U. Sears after himself. Wellcome Collection.

Karen Emery is an educator, having taught in schools, colleges and running a prison education department, as well as working with industry to foster education-business partnerships. As a qualified ITG Tourist Guide since 2013, garden visits are part of her repertoire, which led to an MA in Garden and Landscape History from the University of London in 2021 with a dissertation on designed spa landscape in Britain. Since then, she has become active with the Kent Gardens Trust as researcher and co-ordinator for garden research projects in part of the county.

www.kentgardenstrust.org.uk

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Week 3. 4 October: ‘Leafy Leamington’ with Christine Hodgetts

In 1800 Leamington Priors was a village of a few hundred people. A saline spring had been known since the fifteenth century, but only then were new springs being discovered and developed. by local enterprise. Then followed the growth of a new and planned town north of the river, furnished with houses to attract the upper class clientele coming to take the cure. Public walks and gardens were an essential part of the treatment, which prescribed the amounts of water and exercise to be taken. The earliest gardens were attached to commercial operations. Contemporary correspondence shows the aspirations of some of the participants in creating these spaces: tree - lined streets, garden squares and subscription parks and how they responded to changing fashions. As the century progressed, the needs of the inhabitants of the town became more prominent and a “People’s Park” was created to complete a string of five riverside parks.

Image: Leamington and Pump Rooms, George Rowe 1840.

Christine Hodgetts took her degrees in history at London University. Since completing her PhD she has concentrated on adult education, giving courses on the skills of researching and writing history from the sources. She also works on commission on building and landscape history.

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Week 4. 11 October: A Lost Spa Garden at Dorton Spa Buckinghamshire with Claire de Carle

The story of the Spa at Dorton and its subsequent disappearance into the realms of the forgotten or the unknown is perhaps one of the saddest in spa history. The Chalybeate spa which opened in 1833, was the brainchild of Charles Ricketts, he had become the owner of the Dorton Estate upon his marriage into the Aubrey family. The existence of the spring had been known since the late medieval period; it was Ricketts who had the water analysed, improved the access and employed James Hakewill, architect to design the pump room. Dorton Spa was never going to compete with the likes of Cheltenham or Leamington, being situated in a wood in the rural vale of Aylesbury, and plans were scaled back, the pump room and lodge/ refreshment room being the only buildings, both now gone. However, a boating lake was created, and some planting installed, including an avenue to the entrance of the grounds.

Image: 1890 photo from Bucks Archive D215-1-3.

Claire de Carle is a garden historian, with a keen interest in horticulture, art and social history and she is the chair and a trustee of Buckinghamshire Gardens Trust which is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2022. She was instrumental in the establishment of the Trust’s Research & Recording project in 2013 which has produced reports on around 100 locally important historic gardens. She enjoys researching and writing about little known historic landscape gardens and more recently she has set up two other projects: Artists and their Gardens and Public Parks in Buckinghamshire. She lectures to local groups about Buckinghamshire gardens and Maud Grieve, the herbalist who was the subject of her MA dissertation. Claire lives in Oakley a small village on the Bucks/Oxon border, in her spare time she works on her garden that she and her husband have created over the last seven years.

www.bucksgardenstrust.org.uk

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Week 5. 18 October: 150 years of Edward Milner’s Buxton Pavilion Garden with Anna Rhodes

The Pavilion Gardens in Buxton opened in August 1871. It was created out of the need to provide entertainment, particularly on rainy days, for the thousands of people that came to the town for the ‘water cure’. In under a year, the 12-acre pleasure ground was created – including 5 bridges, 2 miles of paths, 2 cascades, 5000 plants, a bandstand, and a large cast iron pavilion. In the late 1800s the Pavilion Gardens were further extended and improved, including the boating lake, ice rink, tennis courts and a new concert hall designed by Robert Ripon Duke. The Buxton Guide of 1898 declared them - ‘the finest public gardens of any health resort in Europe'. The Gardens, which now extend to 23 acres are loved by visitors and locals alike. This talk will plot their history with particular focus on the Victorian period.

Image: detail, The Lake in the Buxton Gardens, 1870s, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery.

Anna Rhodes has been a curator at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery since 2010. Her research interests include eighteenth-century tourism to Derbyshire, focusing on travel journals and the picturesque tour. Recently she has been involved in cataloguing and researching the Pavilion Garden material in the Museum and working with the Pavilion Gardens to create an exhibition to celebrate their 150th year anniversary.

www.derbyshire.gov.uk/leisure/buxton-museum/buxton-museum-and-art-gallery

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Organised by

The Gardens Trust is the UK national charity dedicated to protecting our heritage of designed gardens and landscapes. We campaign on their behalf, undertake research and conservation work, train volunteers and encourage public appreciation and involvement, working with the national network of County Garden Trusts.

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