Hill Close Gardens Warwick

A listener told me about Hill Close Gardens in the comments on this blog and I am so glad she did. I’d been in Stockholm last year and had trekked across the city to see the allotment plots and found myself wandering between individual gardens with flowers and vegetables and beautiful Summer Houses. One of the gardeners told me - we got the idea from you but I couldn’t square what I was looking at with the allotments you find in the UK. That was until I visited Hill Close Gardens in Warwick and learned about the detached gardens that were apparently once popular with the Victorians, who created their individual plots, side by side, with summer houses and flowers and vegetables.

Listen to the podcast to learn how a quirk of fate meant these gardens survived development and then how a community rescued and restored them. And now they need a little more help to spread the word about how special they are and to support them as they make sure these plots, which have survived for over 170 years, can continue to delight and inspire visitors.

You can visit the Hill Close Garden website and support their fundraising campaign here. And if you are lucky enough to be within striking range of Warwick, I would really recommend you go and visit. And if you aren’t well hopefully the podcast will transport you there.

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to our plant stories and something a little bit different. I'm taking a short summer break but I wanted to leave you with a garden to wander around while I'm away. I think it's very special.

We are, as far as I'm aware, the only publicly accessible Victorian detached garden site left. from what would have been, as I say, a very, very common site. But of course, they were always in the middle of towns and in the middle of cities, and at some point, the value of the land just gets too tempting and all the demand on needing housing or more infrastructure, and it just means those sites then have been developed.

Matt Nolan is our guide as we walk around Hillclose Gardens in Warwick. Once a volunteer in the gardens, he is now the manager. It's a story of Victorian families, the Chadbans, the Sleeths, who had plots here in the 19th century, a community who saved the gardens from development in the 20th century, and a future with a fundraising campaign in the 21st century.

So the story begins in the 1840s where a chap inherited what was just a field at the time which was sandwiched in between the race course which has been here since 1707 and then the medieval town centre of Warwick and he inherited the land which was about five acres and saw the demand at that time for people who were living in the centre of Warwick often in townhouses that had but didn't have their own outdoor garden space. So he split the site into 32 individual gardens, so quite decent sized, 500, 600, 700 square metres per garden, and he rented them out to individuals in Warwick to have as their own. Private, fully hedged, with a lockable door to come in and out of your own little garden, just a couple of hundred yards away from the centre of Warwick.

And who moved in? Who took on these gardens?

It was a mix, but typically when we look at the social history of the site, you will see all sorts of small entrepreneurs who were running businesses in Warwick that were cabinet makers, pub landlords, chemists, solicitors, auctioneers. Yeah, a real mix of sort of entrepreneurial Victorian society.

And we're standing in front of a summer house. It's just tucked into a corner. It's gorgeous with a tiled roof. The lead as well, isn't it? Is that right? Yeah, lead tiled roof, brick built with its windows and there's a fire in there as well. Yeah. So tell me about this one.

Yeah, so I mean, the summer house is an important sort of message for how much people used their gardens. They were using them all year round. So as you mentioned that one has a fireplace so people would have yes of course they would have been storing some things in them whether it's tools or some of their fruit they've been growing for example, but They also would have been here all year round They would have been spending all day here Maybe go to church Sunday morning and then come in the afternoon to do their work on their plots So when does this one date from? This is just gorgeous. So Probably 1880s-ish for this one. These, along with the other six that we have on the site, were restored as part of that initial restoration of the site after its rescue in the mid-1990s to sort of early noughties. So we have a tiny fireplace, a mantle with a mirror and a clock, then another kind of shelf, a few tools, a couple of chairs. Very simple, but you could definitely be out of the cold. Yeah, very much and you'll see we've got some other examples as well. They were all very individual. We've got one that's quite grand with a terrace as well, so I think it reflected, let's say, how much expendable income the different plot holders had and how much they wanted to invest in their plots. But certainly, you know, people, as I say, would be spending quite a lot of time here, so it was just somewhere that they could take some shelter if it was a bit cooler, you know, pop the kettle on, make a cup of tea.

It's a real step up from a shed, isn't it?

Yeah, this is not a tool shed, definitely.

Were the plots numbered?

Yes, and what we've done is we've kept the original plot numbers.

So this is plot 19?

Yes, so we're just moving into 19 now, and as I said we had 32 originally, and then around about 1900. about half of the site was developed so around the edges really we'll see as we walk around where those bites were taken out but we now have the 16 plots that were left in the middle so yeah we're just moving into plot 19 now and plot 19 is one of our collections gardens so we've got two collections in here we have our Hardie Chrysanthemum, which is part of a national plant collection shared with two other gardens. It took a bit of a beating this winter unfortunately, so we're trying to rebuild the collection a little bit now. And then also we have, depends on who you ask, but somewhere between 130 to 160 varieties of snow drop at Hill Close. So when many gardens are, let's say rather quiet or closed in January, February, we are blessed to have a lot of people coming to visit. to see our collection at that time.

And have they been planted since these were plots?

Yeah, so some of the volunteers that were rescuing the site originally were looking for relevant planting and snowdrops were, as far as I understand it, a popular plant in Victorian times. So it was decided by that initial group of volunteers that they would build a collection here and then over the years, it's grown and grown and grown. And we do have some quite rare varieties here as well. There's a Warwickshire Gemini. for example, which is known from this site and is one that people come from many miles around to buy from us when we're selling some of our plants in that February time.

I love this because there's a board about plot 19 which is actually mounted onto a garden fork which is gorgeous, but then I love the detail so originally owned by Thomas Orsopp Gill, an accountant who died in 1898. Quite a number of owners after him including James Glover, architectural engineer, Mrs. Bray, Martin Ivins, auctioneer, the Lapworth family of Linen Street. And then 1933 it's bought by William Biddle, a well-known local greengrocer who had a shop on the Corn Market, 70 Marketplace, erected a glass house on this plot. And after he died, it passed to James Smith, see also plot 16, who carried on the green grocery business in the marketplace until the 1990s. I mean, I love that you have that historical record of who gardened here.

Yeah, and I think... makes this site pretty unique you know the detached garden was a once common site across the UK with lots of obviously old medieval or layouts of towns and cities where there perhaps was a lot of houses that didn't have space for recreational gardens but of course because they were all in the middle of towns and cities over the years they get built on so we're very fortunate to have what social history is as you say absolutely fascinating. You kind of get to see the Victorian up until certainly the Second World War period of what was going on in Warwick, what businesses there were, what people were you know new. startups and local skills that people had if they were you know cabinet makers or boot makers and so yeah I think that aspect people often think about coming to visit at gardens but the social history is certainly a very interesting reason to come and see the site as well.

And they might have been growing vegetables but these are not allotments are they?

No I don't think there was ever going to be a sort of standard use because there's, you know, if you think about 32 individual owners, they would have been doing all sorts of different things, but typically if I'm introducing the gardens to people, we would say that they were probably a bit of a mix. So some ornamental, some productive and some lawn. From people that know better than me say that it was more affordable to get lawnmowers from perhaps 1870 onwards, so maybe a bit more grass after that. But yeah, I think some gardens I'm sure would have been immaculate and some would have been perhaps... the other end of the scale. I think there was politics here, garden politics with the... I would imagine so. Definitely you would see some sort of status battles because some of the plots were owned by, I would say, fairly affluent individuals. They were auctioneers or solicitors. And then others, as I said, might have been a pub landlord. So it was a... there would have perhaps I think been a bit of upmanship on trying to outdo the next garden with what you were growing and the top of the hill where we're sort of moving towards now would have had a longer growing season so maybe if you had your plot up here you would have been able to grow something a bit more exotic or you would have had your longer growing season so that it came with a little bit of exclusivity I think to be towards the top of the hill that Warwick town is plopped on.

It's funny because you've solved a kind of mystery for me because last year we were in Sweden and I trekked quite a long way because I wanted to see the allotment plots and when I got there... there were summer houses. I mean, they were not sheds, they were summer houses. This guy had a piano in his summer house and he slept in his summer house. And I got chatting to one of the guys who showed us around his summer house and he said, yeah, but the idea came from you. You had allotments. That's where we got them from. And I was thinking, this is not what I think of as an allotment. But standing here, this is what I saw in Sweden. This is exactly in Stockholm was small individual plots with summer houses, some vegetables, sunflowers, some grass. So now it kind of makes sense. It didn't at the time.

Yeah, this idea certainly spread extensively across Europe anyway. Where... and is still very popular now in places like the Benelux countries or Germany for example where there are, it was very typical to build fairly large apartment buildings and there wasn't perhaps the limits on space that there is in the UK so they were also building a lot of these garden spaces so even if you had an apartment you still had your outdoor space to enjoy as you say, sometimes your own private plots as well.

The gardens are absolutely magical, Matt. I mean, they are so special and they must hold so much kind of history of the families that garden and their children played and they grew up and then they handed it down or somebody else bought it from them.

That's one of the things that attracted to me about the site and it's, you know, again, I mentioned my horticultural knowledge is limited. But I'm fascinated by social history and I feel like I'm walking in the footsteps of all those lovely Victorians that were battling to start their own businesses. I've been an entrepreneur myself in the past. You know, you see, we've got one plot, for example, who had they had 18 children, 18, three apprentices and two servants all living in the one house in the middle of Warwick, just on the town square. They had a workshop on the lower level. So he was a cabinet maker. So busy, hectic, you imagine a house that was just, I mean, it would have just been chaotic. So I often think about them when I'm walking through their plot. I imagine their plot might not have been the most well-kept, but I have a feeling they maybe just came down here for two or three hours and just laid on the grass. stared at the sky and just enjoyed a little bit of peace and quiet before they went back to the chaos.

Was there a waiting list?

I think in the Victorian times certainly there would have been and that chap in the 1840s... Mr Wilson, when he first split the site into 32 gardens, he rented, that was his plan, was, I want an income from my investment. So all he did was rent them out individually for about 20 years. And then another chap, Mr Phillips, then bought the whole site in 1865. Actually, the auctioneers of the site were margettes who owned the plot that we're about to walk into in a few minutes. But he had a very different plan. He decided that he was going to try and sell them all individually as quick as possible and make a fast return on his investment. And that decision, thankfully, we are very grateful for now because it created so many individual freeholders at the time that then it became very difficult later on to develop the site fully. And for someone to just buy the whole thing, that was very hard. So we saw, as I mentioned in that, 1900, 1910 time. houses that were built around the edge of the site so we lost about 50% of the gardens then but this middle bit was difficult it was you know they would have had to put services in before they built on it access was difficult because you would have to come in off the race course which didn't have road access at the time so we get to around 1950 and the local council decided they wanted to develop the site for social housing so they started buying the plots one by one but it took them 44 years to buy all the remaining plots which gets us to the 1990s which then has that wonderful group of local residents coming in who then were able to rescue and restore the gardens at that time so that decision in the 1860s by Mr Phillips to all of a sudden within about two years create something like 25 freeholders came to bear fruit later on in the 1990s because it had taken so long for the council to buy them all that by that point the residents were able to stop the development and get it restored and we have we're lucky to have what we have today.

How big a battle was that with the residents do you think in the 1990s?

I did know one or two of them, sadly not with us now but and... There's different levels of theatre about it depending on who you spoke to but we're just actually in the area where the machinery came in to the site so we're stood next to a metal railing where normally if you look everywhere else on our site all of the gardens have hedging around the edges. It was decided to keep this as a railing because this is a reminder of this is where they started to clear the site. The word spread very quickly around the local residents that machinery had been brought on site and a group of them came down and... I don't want to say laid in front of the bulldozers but a discussion was started about hopefully getting any development stopped at that point to allow some time for the story to be given to the council about actually how historically important this site was and once that case had been made then the council stopped the development straight away and then we were able to get listed status for both some of the summer houses and then shortly afterwards stop on being able to develop the site but in reality we would have been stood in and amongst housing if those local residents hadn't done what they'd done at that time so we stand on their shoulders in terms of the the efforts that they did and then if we think just about the restoration I mean we're only two and a half acres ish now but it's 16 individual gardens of five six seven hundred square meters each with collections you know the place was the council had been buying some of the plots literally from 1950 and they've just been sat going wild summer houses collapsing roofs falling in so they apart from one plot which has been garden all the way through from the 1840s. Pretty much all the others had been just falling apart and going wild, so it was an enormous effort to clear and restore the site to see, yeah, pretty much what we have today. We're in a plot at the moment that's got a couple of interesting areas of planting. The border, if we look across to our left on the site, is a Warwickshire plot, if you like, which got the tree at the top is the Shakespeare apple, which is pretty rare. I think there's only 30 or 40 known trees left of the Shakespeare apple. There's a Wyken Pippin apple. Wyken is an area just over the other side of Coventry. and then the tree at the bottom is a Warwick's Ydrupa plum, which is an absolute banger of a plum. It's great cooking or eating. So it's, and then some of the planting as well in the border itself, sort of more, more local variety. So yeah, so it's, But that's very specialist knowledge. Again, the border to our right here, there's some very unusual plants. And it's, yeah, one of our challenges is somehow that the knowledge isn't lost. Whether that's the social history or the horticulture here, it's, you know, you can lose one volunteer, and a huge part of that knowledge can just walk out the door at the same time. So, that's... resilience to be able to carry on all of that hard work and things is certainly one of our challenges. hoping a Skylark will do its loveliness for us. We've got quite a lot of Skylarks that nest on the race course and at times you just... the prevailing wind brings that song towards as it comes across from the race course and sometimes you get, you know, there's ten males absolutely going hell for leather. We also work with a local hedgehog charity, so we're a release site for rescued hogs as well. So ones that can't be taken back if it was a busy road where they were found or then they bring them here. So we've had about. 25ish something like that released over the last 12 months or so on this site. Lots of hedgerows for them to be able to mooch around in and we've got some feeding stations. Not long had one put in that's got a camera in it as well so we can see our hogs every night going in and having a bite to eat.

As a hedgehog I would be so happy to be released here.

Yeah they're probably worst places in the world to go I think and they can then. If they want to find their own territories they can spread off down the sides of the race course and get to other woodland areas that are not too far away as well. Why would you move? Yeah, interested. One of the chaps from the charity that released them here was saying Often now actually urban, suburban areas are quite good for them. A lot of the rural areas now are perhaps not that suitable because the hedgerows are gone, the woodlands are gone, there are chemicals potentially on the site. So yeah, I'm very happy that we're able to help in a small way for a species that has had an awful time. The numbers are 60% down since the 1990s or something. So... Yeah, another little bit of work that Hill Close can do.

You do so many things. I love this. So we're going through a gate basically so this would have been delineating that you had moved into a different plot. Oh, do you know every time you go into another plot it's like just you know being able to pop into another little show garden almost, you know what I mean? Another beautiful space, another beautiful garden.

Yeah and this plot's been looked after by a lovely couple who have done it for about eight or nine years now so in plots where... volunteers have sort of made their mark, you know, they just work with the head gardener and make sure that it's something that's, you know, that would work in the soils and what have you, but then they're pretty much given the freedom to do what they want. There's a tiny blackbird over there that has been kind of just the... You must have so many... well you have obviously so many birds. Do we also have a few local cats which adds to the challenges sometimes for the birds. We've got... I was talking about the hedgehogs before so we have our feeding station with the camera in this...

Oh wow so this is the hedgehog feeding station. So can you literally see them going in and out at night?

I can. My plan is to get this hopefully on the website or so that we can share it.

So Matt, this is on your phone. So basically you need TV when you've got hedgehogs to watch.

So I think, if I remember rightly, we had some hog activity during the night. So we're seeing them pretty much every night now that...

Okay, so this is footage on Matt's phone. You definitely have to get this on the website, don't you? It would be fascinating. We'd all be just watching this.

This is what I would call slow TV. Yeah, yeah. You watch a hedgehog bumble its little head and then it kind of faffs around a little bit. Then it finds the bowl with the biscuits in. It's very funny. We have one particular. I'm pretty sure, not that I'm making any assumptions, but it's likely to be a young male. There's a brick just to one side of the little bowl that has the food in and he always climbs, instead of walking round the brick, he climbs over the top of the brick because it's another ten steps to get all the way round obviously and then just face plants into the bowl and sometimes he obviously eats so much that he just passes out he can be there for half an hour but he's not eating anything, he's just, you know his belly's full and then the sleep switch hits on and that's it and he's just there upside down, face down in the bowl. I love that you get to know them. Very important work. Very, very important work.

How many gardeners do you have?

So in terms of the sort of staff, we have Neil, who's our head gardener, and then we have a rag trainee, Lou, and then Alison, who looks after our nursery. So both Lou and Alison are one day a week, and then Neil is full time. And then an enormous, wonderful group of... probably somewhere between 40 and 50 garden volunteers, some of whom are just here now and again, and then others who are here 20 hours a week. They maybe look after some of the collections that we've talked about, or they're working in the nursery, they're part of our watering team. We're stood in beautiful, warm sunshine now, but of course all of our plant sales that are in pots and the nursery and the greenhouse. needs watering sometimes three or four times a day when the weather is very warm. So yes, so like me when I first came to Hill Close I was a garden volunteer and a tour guide but in my garden volunteering because my horticultural knowledge is let's just say limited. I was part of the heavy labour crew, lots of our volunteers are you know fairly elderly or quite mature so they're not able to perhaps do some of the physical work so I was hedge cutter, compost turner. you know, wheel, barrow, pusher, that was a lot of my volunteering here.

How are you funded?

So we, it's a mix really, we're very blessed with the site that we have that we are able to earn income through a variety of different activities. We have a lovely room as part of our visitor centre that we can rent out, so hire is really our most important income. People often are surprised that the admissions income from the gardens isn't more, but in reality it's third or fourth down the list in terms of how we are able to get the money to run the place. Grants and funding is hugely important. We have our tea room that we run on the weekends from April to October. We have a membership scheme. We have a little shop. We have a children and families team that do activities. Yeah, it takes all of that and will take more to keep the place going. Yeah, going forward.

So you're about to launch a campaign for what? Yes. So why do you need 50,000?

So some of our responsibility with looking after the site now is coming to some fairly significant maintenance jobs. The site was restored. you know, 25, 30 years ago. So actually quite a lot of the buildings need some important work doing now. We have to, for example, replace a heat pump in the visitor center, which is just 12 and a half thousand alone, just to replace that. There's also more work that we want to do with the community. And unfortunately, our income really just covers. day-to-day costs rather than being able to do those much larger jobs. So the campaign started in April and then across the next 12 months our aim is to try and achieve that £50,000.

So do you suspect there are some people in Warwick now who don't know that you exist?

There are lots of people in Warwick who don't even know that we exist unfortunately. It's a very common thing, you know I'm working on the front desk welcoming visitors a lot of the time. I certainly hear it multiple times a week. I only lived around the corner. I never even knew it was here. Of course, at times maybe though, it's been the last 25 years or so where people might know it as a public gardens. Before that, they wouldn't have known it maybe, or certainly during the time when the council were buying the plots, it would have just been almost a bit of a... not wasteland but it was just rough ground really. It would have been known by all the feral local kids so I would have definitely been here. You know, clumbering through dangerous summer houses and yeah, absolutely having war games in the basements and all that sort of stuff. It would have been heavenly I think for young children in this area but... Yeah, it's so common that people don't know that we're here. So we're trying to build relationships with, you know, the tourist office and other local businesses just to get us more on the map. But with our resources that we've got at the moment, really us and the team, we're just focused on doing as good a job as we can do for the people that do come in, make sure they have as much of a lovely time as they possibly can. And then hopefully they come back with a friend next time. And that friend then comes back with a friend. And then their friend joins as a member. And then one of their friends hires the venue. And then, oh yeah, so that's how I am sort of looking at it in terms of, yeah, it's a bit of a long game, but we've done very well over the last 18 months, really, in significantly growing the footfall and the higher income. But unfortunately, at the same time, the costs, escalating costs, It is a bit of a battle, but a very worthwhile one. So when people talk about purpose, well, our purpose is very clear. We need this place to be here for as many people as possible to enjoy and to support biodiversity in the area. Yeah, it couldn't be clearer why we're here.

You're seriously passionate about this place, aren't you?

Well, hopefully, you having walked around and been here, you get a bit of a flavour for why it's such an important space. People talk about a sense of place, don't they? And for me, Hill Close absolutely smacks of that as a sense of place. And it wasn't a big grand estate house with a huge garden. And these were just, you know, average Warwick folks extra cash and wanted a little garden of their own and do that over 170 years and you end up with what we've got now.

I will put lots of photographs of Hillclose Gardens on our Plant Stories website and I would urge you, if you live anywhere within striking distance of Warwick, do go and take a look.

I often say you can just tell when people are walking out of the site. The shoulders are just slightly lower than when they walked in. And for me, that's priceless. It doesn't need an explaining any more than that.

Our Plant Stories is an independent podcast presented and produced by me, Sally Flutman.