the oldest surviving pleasure garden in britain: cold bath, near tunbridge wells in kent

The Garden History Society

The Oldest Surviving Pleasure Garden in Britain: Cold Bath, near Tunbridge Wells in KentAuthor(s): Kristina TaylorSource: Garden History, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2000), pp. 277-282Published by: The Garden History SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1587274 .

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NOTE

THE OLDEST SURVIVING PLEASURE GARDEN

IN BRITAIN: COLD BATH, NEAR TUNBRIDGE

WELLS IN KENT

The oldest public pleasure gardens to survive in Britain are part of the gardens of the Beacon Hotel in Rusthall, i miles west of Tunbridge Wells in Kent. Originally created in 1708, even after nearly three centuries the gardens retain some of their most important features and continue their historic use. The gardens cover an area of 3.8 hectares and are below a sandstone ridge on a south-facing and sloping valley site (Figure i). Over one hundred old stone steps lead from Rusthall Common down to the entrance (Figure z). John Bowra's Map of Tunbridge Wells (1738) marks the position of the steps on a circular coach road which leads to and from the Wells taking in the High Rocks, another period tourist attraction (Figure 3).1 The gardens contained a bath

or plunge pool with fountains and other waterworks and an ornamental garden open to the public.

The author Benge Burr wrote in 1766:

In one thousand, seven hundred and eight, the cold bath at Rusthall was built by Mr James Long at considerable expence. This bath is esteemed equal to any in the kingdom, being most plenitfully supplied with the finest rock water from the neighbouring hills. The bath was at first adorned with amusing waterworks, and a handsome house over it, in every room of which was something curious, calculated to divert and surprise the company. The ground and gardens belonging to the bath were elegantly laid out, and embellished with fountains, and other orna- ments suitable to the place; in short, the whole

Figure I. Turn-of-the-century postcard view (originally in colour) taken from Rusthall Common overlooking the garden, or 'Happy Valley'.



GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

Figure z. Stone steps down from Rusthall Common to the entrance of the gardens. Photo: author, zooo.

was most completely disposed for a scene of amusement.2

The development of the Wells at Tunbridge began soon after Lord North's discovery in 1606 of a mineral spring.3 He recognized the water as being similar to that of a spa in Belgium, well known for its health- giving properties. Lord Abergavenny, the owner of the land, allowed the first well to be sunk in i608, and the fame of the water spread rapidly, attracting the Royal patronage of Queen Henrietta Maria in I629 and Charles II in I663. Because there was no accom- modation at the Wells, people lodged at inns and houses up to 5 miles away. Rusthall, i1 miles away, grew to accommodate the visitors.4 By the end of the Civil War in I660, Rusthall had an assembly room, bowling green and other places appropriated to public diversion.

The Lord of the Manor of Rusthall, Thomas Neale, announced through his steward in i68z that since the bowling green near the top of the steps was still in use at Rusthall, access to the green and the Wells should be free to everyone, thus confirming the concept of public accessibility.s Neale then started to

develop the land around the Wells, building a colon- nade in 1687, which was renamed The Pantiles in I700, while the assembly rooms were moved nearer to the Wells at Mount Sion.6

There was considerable speculative activity too as the visitors needed to be entertained when they were not drinking the waters. The pleasure gardens would have been one of a number of divertissements that visitors would have taken around the sur- rounding countryside of the Wells. 'In this period the place called the Fishponds was opened for the amusement of the public; ... it was justly esteemed one of the principal scenes of diversion at Tunbridge.'7 The fishponds were created behind Chancellor House on Mount Ephraim (not shown in Figure 3).

The developer of the cold bath was James Long, who lived in Mary Bone [Marylebone] in London.8 He owned many properties including the Blowpost Tavern, St Martins-in-the-Fields,9 and he may have known Neale who also lived in the parish.10 Around the same time and within a mile of King's Cross, London, spas were flourishing with which Long would have been familiar. St Pancras from I697 had

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Figure 3. Map of Tunbridge Wells by John Bowra (I738) (detail). The steps leading from the coach road to the gardens are left of centre. Courtesy: Tunbridge Wells Museum and Art Gallery.



GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

Figure 4. Stone rill from the second to the third pond in the gardens. Photo: author, zooo.

pump rooms as well as extensive gardens designed in the formal fashion, and there were also medicinal springs at Islington, Clerkenwell, Saddlers Wells and to the north at Hampstead." Long may also have known about the fishponds fed by springs in a gentleman's garden at Lewisham, 5 miles south of London, where trout (which need well-oxygenated water) were successfully raised in I684.12

COLD BATH

Therefore, there was a precedence of springs with pleasure gardens and entertainments connected to them. And the making of a garden with amusements

near a tourist spot would have been within this context. However, the making of the cold plunge pool was innovative. It predated the baths at Tunbridge Wells by 50 years and all the other plunge pools at Cold Bath made later in the eighteenth century.13

When Long died in March I715, his nephew Robert inherited his estates.14 However, by I766 the gardens had fallen into disrepair:

But all this is now far gone in decay through the want of management, and the neglect of the late proprietors, who have suffered the house to fall, and the gardens to lie waste and wild; but the bath itself is well-preserved, and lately a plain

280



NOTE

Figure 5. Majolica tiles originally from the lining of the cold plunge pool, but now in the fireplace at the Beacon Hotel, Rusthall in Kent. Photo: author, zooo.

ornamented building has been raised over it, which, though it retains none of the beauties of the former elegant structure, is perhaps full as useful as the old one.15

Miss Mary Berry visited the gardens in 1807 and wrote in her journal:

Thursday I5th October - Went again on a drawing expedition with Lady Donegal. Went to Langton Green and looked at the cold bath, where there are the remains of hewn stone steps and yew hedges of an old public garden, which this was in the day of Charles In; and the cold bath beautifully clear; it is in a large, half-ruined room; a peasant's family now inhabiting what was the dressing room.16

It is therefore apparent that the romantic cold bath could still be visited by this date, and a 1823 guide to Tunbridge Wells by J. Clifford also contains a refer- ence to the bath:

Lines pencilled on a table at the Cold Bath, July i8zo. This rural spot its ancient grandeur shows, When Tunbridge Wells amidst a desert rose; Where nature seems with a diffusive hand To shed her blessings o'er her neighboring land, And courts the gay beneath its sacred bowers, To taste its sweets and commune with past hours.17

That the gardens have survived is due entirely to the land being continuously owned and leased out by the Abergavenny estate, until they were sold in I95o.

The three surviving spring-fed ponds, of 0.56 hectares, one below one another, are z metres deep, clay puddled and partly lined with stone. There is also a well-made stone rill from the second to the third pond (Figure 4). Nearby is a cold plunge pool, originally lined with majolica tiles (Figure 5) and also fed by a spring. Some of these tiles, which are of the type manufactured in London in the early eighteenth century, can still be seen in a fireplace in the dining room of the Beacon Hotel.18

Leading down the hill to the pool are the remains of a yew hedge and some specimen yew trees possibly connected to the 1708 layout. They line up at right angles and are evenly spaced, and based on a comparison with trees at Hampton Court Palace they might be c.30oo years old.'9

Maps from the first half of the nineteenth century show the cold bath field separate from other fields. In I806, the old gardens, depicted as woodland, and other farming land were leased at an annual rent of ?I8.20 On the I850 Manor map, Lord Abergavenny used the land himself as part of his Hungershall Farm, east of the gardens.21

Comparison of the 1738 Bowra map (Figure 3) and the I867 Ordnance Survey (os) map raises a number of questions. First, the ponds on the Bowra

28I



GARDEN HISTORY 28:2

map are apparently regular in shape without the spit of land jutting out into the third large pond, which was perhaps designed as a casting spot. Second, on the Bowra map, the stream outlet from the third pond is in the south-east corner, while on the os map it is in the south-west corner to drain the waters south into the River Grom. The present contouring suggests that Bowra was inaccurate in this detail. Earlier nineteenth-century maps do not depict the ponds at all. However, the smallest pond lies over a spring depicted on the os map. This may have been a fountain pool.22

What is consistent throughout all the maps is the field pattern and the areas of woodland, ponds and meadow. The ponds lie in the middle of the valley and the sloping sides are wooded. The field to the top west of the gardens has remained a meadow throughout. Because of the topography, any other way of maximizing the use of the land would have been difficult. In 1894, Sir Walter Harris leased the old gardens with land overlooking the valley and built a large red brick and tile-hung house called Rusthall Beacon (now the Beacon Hotel) designed by Sir

Robert Edis, whose name was signed on the plans now in the house. He also extended the grounds to include the area west of the old pleasure gardens. In 1911, the property, then owned by Colonel and Mrs Sladen, was richly planted with evergreens, rhododen- drons, herbaceous plants, a kitchen garden glorified with roses and climbers, an aviary, and black sheep in a meadow. The Sladens stocked the ponds with trout from Loch Leven, 'which only seemed to flourish in the warmest one'.3 Some interesting trees and plants from this period survive today. At present there are carp, roach and perch in the largest pond confirming that after three centuries the fishponds remain viable. The old gardens are overgrown with laurels, rhodod- endrons and scrub trees in the meadow. The present owners have recently repaired the leaking dams and the second pond is being refilled. They would like to restore the grounds as a modern pleasure garden with an open-air theatre and amusements as an extension to their business at the Beacon Hotel. Such an undertaking would be appropriate given the history of the garden and its importance as a unique survival of an early eighteenth-century pleasure garden.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author thanks John and Di Cullen, and the staff and gardeners at the Beacon Hotel; Ian Beavis of the Tunbridge Wells Museum; and Michael Symes for discussions on cold baths and plunge pools.

KRISTINA TAYLOR

Sharsted, Io1 Kippington Road, Sevenoaks, Kent TNI3 2LL, UK

REFERENCES

1 A Publican & Gentleman, The High Rocks (Tunbridge Wells: Stanford Printing Co., 1964), Io.

2 Benge Burr, The History of Tunbridge Wells (Tunbridge Wells: author, 1766), 59.

3 Information from a display at the Tunbridge Wells Museum.

4 Burr, History of Tunbridge Wells, 40. 5 Kent Record Office, u 749 T2. 6 Burr, History of Tunbridge Wells, 46. 7 J. Sprange, Tunbridge Wells Directory

(Tunbridge Wells: author, 1786), 32. 8 Public Record Office, Prob II 545. 9 Ibid., Prob 32 59/I3I.

10 Kent Record Office, u 749 T2. 1 James S. Curl, 'Spas and pleasure gardens of

London, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries', Garden History, vII/z (1980), 27-68.

12 Roger North, Discourse of Fish and Fishponds, znd edn (London, I7I5), Ioo.

13 Burr, History of Tunbridge Wells, 60.

14 Public Record Office, Prob II 545. 15

Burr, History of Tunbridge Wells, 61. 16 Mary Berry, Extracts from the Journals and

Correspondence of Miss Berry, edited by Lady Theresa Lewis, 3 vols (London: Longmans & Co., 1865), II, 322.

17 J. Clifford, Guide to Tunbridge Wells, 3rd edn (Tunbridge Wells: author, 1823), 55.

18 Personal communication with John Cullen, the owner of the hotel, 1999.

19 Donald Pigott, 'The radial growth-rate of yews (Taxus baccata) at Hampton Court, Middlesex', Garden History, xxIII/z (I995), 249-52. 20 Sussex Record Office, ABE 27 A.

21 John Stidolph, 'Manor Map of Rusthall' (I850), Kent Record Office, MS.

2 Burr, History of Tunbridge Wells, 60.

23 'The Mayor's garden party', Tunbridge Wells Advertiser (30 June 1911), Io.

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the oldest surviving pleasure garden in britain: cold bath, near tunbridge wells in kent

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