Designed landscapes are typically defined as places laid out for artistic effect or aesthetic purposes, somewhere to contemplate and admire. Yet many people have a much more active relationship with outdoor spaces, engaging with them for jogging, cycling, ball games, playgrounds and carnival rides. They are places to play.
This Gardens Trust series will examine the relationship between historic designed landscapes and organized recreation. We’ll be exploring children’s outdoor play, a world-famous theme park set among a Grade 1 Regency landscape, a Premier League football stadium that was once a Victorian pleasure ground, an early 18th-century estate that is now a golf course, and a Victorian public park which was opposed by local workers despite its claimed recreational and health-giving benefits.
This ticket (register HERE) is for this individual session and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £35 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 or £26.25). Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Week Four: Sudbrook Park, currently the home of the Richmond upon Thames Golf Club, has an interesting, if not chequered, history. Created in the early 18th century by John Campbell, 2nd Duke of Argyll; at its peak it totaled a hundred and thirty acres of freehold and copyhold land, with a fine mansion designed by James Gibbs at its center. The estate appears on John Rocque’s 1746 map of London, which records the owner as Argyll’s widow. In the early 19th century, the estate was owned by Member of Parliament and public servant Robert Wilmot Horton, who made extensive improvements, enlarging and remodeling the pleasure grounds in the fashionable gardenesque style. The estate almost succumbed to the Richmond building boom of the mid-19th century but was saved at the last minute to become a hydropathic establishment and eventually, in 1898, a golf club. This talk will give an overview of its changing fortunes and its colorful owners and tenants.
Sandra Pullen is a member of the Gardens Trust Education and Training Committee and has been active in their online and in-person events since 2020. She completed an MA in the history of landscape and garden history from the Institute of Historical Research in 2021. As well as lecturing regularly on various aspects of garden history, she has been a guide for several historic houses in the Twickenham area.
Image: G. Eyre Brooks, Sudbrook Park, Petersham, Surrey (c.1840), courtesy of Richmond upon Thames Art Collection
