King’s Gardens Community News

May 2013

Sefton Council have worked hard over the last few years securing funding from theHeritage Lottery Fund for the restoration of the park. Sefton Council, who manage the site, were successful in securing £5.5 million to pay for these works with the majority coming from the HLF under their Parks for People programme.

The Council carried out extensive research with local people and visitors to the gardens, which helped to shape and support both stages of the bidding process.

We all hope you enjoy King’s Gardens!

The renovation works at the park are being carried out by The Casey Group Ltd.

Casey have an impressive reputation in park renovation, having carried out 14 Heritage Lottery funded park restorations over the past 5 years. Last year they won the top British Association of Landscape Industries Award for the work they carried out at Lichfield Park in Staffordshire. So you know the park is in great hands!

In this newsletter - the first of three over the restoration project - Casey will keep you informed of progress. But go ahead and visit the park to see it for yourself!

Don’t forget to check out the protective hoardings around the Casey site compound. They show how the park looked in its heyday, along with proposals for the new design.

The Works

King’s Gardens are a beautiful town centre park in Southport on the Promenade. The physical restoration is well underway and if you take a visit to the gardens you are sure to fall in love with what you see.

The Friends of King’s Gardens have been recording the restoration through facebook (Friends of Kings Gardens Southport) and on twitter (@kingsgardenssp), so if you enjoy social networking why not follow them!

If you are interested is supporting the project, there are lots of ways you can get involved.

• Maybe you are good at promoting? We want to encourage people to come to King’s Gardens. Do you have any ideas on how we can do this? Would you like to offer your skills by volunteering some time to support it?

• Are you part of a club or group who would like to use the gardens for their activity?

• Are you interested in history? You could help to develop a guided tour or help in the development of the visitor information centre.

• Are you interested in gardening? If so you can join the garden group - look out for planting workshops starting in September/October 2013.

These are just a few ideas. We’re sure you’ll have plenty more. King’s Gardens would benefit from your involvement and what a fantastic project this is to be involved in.

For further information please contact jane.little-smith@sefton.gov.uk or friendsofkingsgardens@gmail.com or telephone Sefton Council on 0151 934 2421.

Piece by piece, bolt by boltRegular visitors to the gardens will have seen the slow and painstaking process of dismantling the first of the cast iron shelters.

The shelters have been dismantled piece by piece to be taken off site for the intensive programme of refurbishment and repair.

It has been a slow process with this first shelter. Every part had to be tagged to make sure that it was put back in the correct place. As the specialist contractors become familiar with the parts and construction, repair time should improve for each successive shelter.

Early paintings and photos of these shelters show them in a dark green colour. Paint samples taken from the shelters themselves confirm that these structures were originally painted in the same green as other structures at the park.

The image on the left, provided by scheme architects Lloyd Evans Pritchard Ltd, shows the colour scheme planned for the refurbished shelters.

The first of the renovated shelters should be in place by August.

Last penny spent at former ladies’ toiletsCasey staff took a walk back in time when they opened the door to the former ladies’ toilets which were last in use about 10 years ago.

The sanitaryware will go to make way for the new Visitors’ Centre which when completed will be used as a small exhibition area, gallery space and offices. The tiled walls and floors will be saved, cleaned and repaired to retain some of the heritage of the building. The refurbished building will see the front door returned to the original position and leaded lights will be preserved and replicated to match the existing.

Wall tiling above, and floor detail below

One and four an hour, if you please Sir

Within the archives at Sefton Council, the original tender documents for the construction of the park in the 1930s have caused some interest recently. How times have changed!

The documents show that the original Venetian Bridge was built for the princely sum of £5,650. That’s the equivalent of £310,000 in today’s money (source: Bank of England Historic Inflation Calculator). We are now spending around £500,000 on its restoration!

The detail of the tender document shows wage rates at the time. Definitely a bygone age! Labourers earned a shilling and four pence an hour (that’s 6.66 pence in decimal, or £3.67 now adjusted for 80 years’ inflation), with joiners earning one and ten (9.16 pence, or £5.04 today).

Blacksmiths and rivetters were the highest paid tradesmen, earning three shillings an hour, or 15 pence (£8.25 today).

There are some unusual items listed. Look at the “man with horse and cart” and the “steam lorry and driver”.

If this has piqued your interest in the period, Southport Yesteryear has a facebook page with hundreds of photographs of Southport. Rod Bleackley has put together a very interesting page and it’s well worth a look, with images dating back to the early 1900s.

Constructing a great career

Casey were recently able to help a number of students from Southport College Construction Department with some practical experience.

Although it was just a taste of working on a construction project, the students were able to see just what happens within the sphere of their chosen career path.

Several of the students want to embark on a career in Quantity Surveying and Project Management, and Casey wish them every success for the future.

We imagine they will be looking to earn a bit more than those rates above though!

Ugly ducklingsA pair of nesting swans have caused some disruption to progress to one of the islands. The pair established a nest following the extensive clearance of shrubs and bushes.

They will be well looked after by Casey site staff though, and nature will be allowed to take its course. The twitchers amongst the Casey team are eagerly awaiting the arrival of cygnets.

The Casey Group LtdRydings Road, Rochdale, OL12 9PS

Tel: 01706 341121

www.casey.co.uk caseycompanies

We’d like to say thank you to the Friends of Kings Gardens and Southport Yesteryear for the use of their photos in this publication. They both have really interesting facebook pages - make sure you take a look.

A special thanks