Sun shelter and rock gardens and pools, Winterstoke Gardens, Ramsgate, Kent

Summary

Landscaping of a municipal park on the cliff top to the east of Ramsgate, built 1920-1923 to the designs of Sir John Burnet and Partners and Pulham and Sons. The work was a gift to the borough from Dame Janet Stancombe-Wills who owned the nearby house, East Court.

Description

MATERIALS and PLAN: cement render and Pulhamite cement rockwork over hardcore, with iron railings. The design takes advantage of the fact that the ground slopes towards the south to place the sun shelter and rockery as a front to the sloping terrain. The central element in the planned landscape is a circular pool in front of which is a bowed, segmental sun shelter. The shelter, in a neoclassical style, is flanked by extensive portions of Pulhamite rockery which extend to east and west forming the northern side of the cliff top path.

EXTERIOR: the sun shelter is set back from the cliff top path behind an approximately rectangular lawn which has one curved side. It has cement walls which are smoothly rendered in imitation of ashlar. Its south face is bowed and has a segmental colonnade of five bays divided by paired, baseless Tuscan columns supporting a full entablature. The two lateral bays were originally glazed. Above this is a parapet with a metal balustrade which rises higher at the centre and supports a shield showing a ram ridden by a child in low relief, apparently carved by Gilbert Bayes. At either end are rectangular pylons with a moulded bases and doorways (that to the right now blocked).

At either side of this feature, enclosing the rectangular lawn and then extending to east and west along the northern side of the path, are near-continuous rockeries of varying height enclosing planting troughs. These extend for approximately 103m to the east and 122m to the west and include flights of stairs rising from the cliff top path at each midway point. The land slopes from north to south and to the north of the sun shelter and at a higher level is a circular fountain pool with a flagged surround which dictates the crescent shape of the sun shelter. Low walling includes a curved bench on the northern side of the pool and the balustrade above the sun shelter includes the shield at its centre which is inscribed on this side with the words: 'WINTERSTOKE GARDENS / THESE GARDENS / WERE LAID OUT AND PRESENTED / TO THE BOROUGH OF RAMSGATE / BY / DAME / JANET STANCOMB-WILLS D.B.E. / IN / THE YEAR 1920 / AND OPENED TO THE PUBLIC / IN THE YEAR 1923 / UNDER THE MAYORALTY OF / ARTHUR W LARKIN ESQ. J.P. C.C.'

At a distance of approximately 40 and 45m to the north-east of the sun shelter are an outcrop of Pulhamite with a bench and a further bench and platform, and 60m to the south-west of the shelter is a five-sided pool with a fountain spout in the shape of a lion’s mask above which is an urn and to the rear of which (facing west) is a concrete bench. Both the pool and the urn have been filled in.

INTERIOR: the ceiling of the shelter has a shallow barrel vault which follows the curve of the building. The rear wall of the colonnade has a continuous bench with a moulded edge to the seat. To the centre, and to either side wall, are niches with arched heads. The central niche held a fountain and a sculpture of a ram jumping over a gate, also believed to have been carved by Gilbert Bayes, which was removed in about 1970.

Parts of the asset were previously listed separately. The duplicate records (List entry numbers 1086074 and 1203661) were removed from the List on 26 June 2020 and List entry 1281609 was removed from the List on 10 July 2020.

History

From the mid-C18 Ramsgate became increasingly popular as a seaside resort, its expansion being accelerated by road improvements and faster sea passage offered by hoys, packets and steamers. An assembly room, warm water baths, subscription libraries and places of worship were joined by new streets such as Effingham Street and speculative crescents and squares on the East and West Cliffs such as Albion Place of about 1791-1798 and Nelson Crescent of about 1800-1805. During the Napoleonic Wars Ramsgate became a busy garrison town and a major port of embarkation. Ramsgate’s importance in the 1820s is attested by its patronage by the British and European royal families and the creation of a separate parish by Act of Parliament, served by the large Church of St George (1824-1827). The harbour is the only one in the British Isles which has the designation ‘Royal’, granted by George IV.

The arrival of the South Eastern Railway’s branch line in 1846 opened up Ramsgate to mass tourism and popular culture, bringing a range of inexpensive, lively resort facilities intended for the sorts of middle- and working-class holidaymakers depicted in WP Frith’s painting ‘Ramsgate Sands’ of 1854 (Royal Collection). Wealthier visitors were accommodated at a respectable distance from the town in developments such as EW Pugin’s Granville Hotel of 1867-1869. Competition with other Kentish resorts stimulated a series of large-scale improvements in the late-C19 and early-C20 including the construction of Royal Parade and landscaped stairs and pathways at the eastern and western ends of the seafront to join the upper promenades to the Undercliff walks. New schools, hospitals and services were also built. The thriving town attracted diverse faith communities; Moses Montefiore founded a synagogue and a religious college at East Cliff Lodge, while AWN Pugin St Augustine’s Church and the Grange as part of an intended Catholic community on the West Cliff.

In 1940 the harbour was the point of return for many of the small boats involved in the evacuation from Dunkirk and war-time precautions included the digging of extensive air raid shelter tunnels in the chalk beneath the town. Ramsgate remained a popular holiday destination until the advent of cheap foreign travel in the post-war decades. Falling visitor numbers were exacerbated by the decline of the town’s small trades and industries, fishing and boat-building. However the large marina created in the inner harbour in the 1970s and developments such as a hoverport and ferry terminus continued to bring life to the area in the later C20, albeit that hovercraft and ferry sailings have now ceased.

Rock gardens first seem to have appeared in England from the C17 as a suitable setting for exotic plants. The influential landscape designers Humphry Repton (1752-1818) and John Claudius Loudon (1783-1843) both promoted the idea of naturalistic rock formations in a landscape and this coincided with the importation of new species of plants into England from mountainous areas.

From the 1840s a number of companies began experimenting with cements to cover a base of hard core in imitation of large-scale rock formations. James Pulham and Son of Broxbourne in Hertfordshire were amongst several such makers, and also specialised in terracotta ornaments. The longevity of their company which produced work from about 1840 to 1945 under the leadership of three generations of the Pulham family, all named James, marked them out, as did the quality of their products. Their work and patrons included relatively modest suburban villas as well as bankers, ship and railway owners and the royal family. Work at Sandringham, Windsor and Buckingham Palace earned the company a royal warrant in 1895. ‘Durability Guaranteed’ was one of the company’s claims, and this has largely proved to be true. Whether real stone or artificial, an aim of designers was to replicate the appearance of genuine rock formations with geological strata. Pulhams was noted for this and from the 1880s they experimented with different colours and textures of cement. The structure of their designs was a core of over-burnt bricks, waste stone and slag, or other industrial waste that was locally available. Overhangs were of real slate or sandstone and the whole structure was finished with two coats of render.

The various constructions of rockwork at Ramsgate, realised by Ramsgate Corporation from the 1890s, with the last work on the Winterstoke Chine in 1936, form one of the largest groupings of their designs and provides a good cross-section of their work and the compositional possibilities offered by different locations and gradients.

Winterstoke Gardens with rockery work by Sir John Burnet and Partners and Pulham and Sons was laid out in 1921-1923. A gift to the borough from Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills, it is believed to have cost more than £10,000 and is the subject of this present case. As a continuation of this planned landscape, the portion of cliff face and the sloping pathway which forms Winterstoke Chine, connecting the Eastcliff to Winterstoke Undercliff, were added in 1936 to the designs of Pulham and Sons with the borough engineer, Alec Adlington.

Reasons for Listing

The Sun Shelter, Rock Gardens, Pools and Benches, Winterstoke Gardens, Victoria Parade, Ramsgate is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Architectural interest:

* it is comparable in interest to other designated examples of Pulhamite structures and representative of the Pulhams' innovative design and construction of garden and park structures.

Historic interest:

* the laying out of the cliff-top gardens was an act of enlightened patronage and civic improvement by Dame Janet Stancomb-Wills, the patroness and owner of East Court Ramsgate, which stands nearby;
* this forms part of an important grouping of Pulhamite structures which are spaced along the seafront at Ramsgate and which were built in the period between 1894 and 1936;
* the design of Winterstoke Gardens was made by the noted architectural firm of Sir John Burnet and Partners.

Group value:

* with The Rock Gardens and cliff stairs about 30m south of sun shelter, Victoria Parade (Grade II) and East Court, Brockenhurst Road (Grade II*) and former stable block to north of East Court, Brockenhurst Road (Grade II).

External Links

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