New Penny: update

A year or two back I wrote a piece called Doomed: The New Penny. This is an update on the site’s redevelopment.

–

BEFORE: Georgian pub building, not looking its best here with its sash windows boarded up, but whose original walled courtyard retained a beautifully preserved stable block and hayloft within a mature orchard garden.

–

AFTER: Plastic-clad toytown flat-pack junk architecture with tight-arse Lego windows and nauseously disjointed elevations, completely out of kilter with the early Victorian terrace it adjoins.

–

Why?

–

WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY?!?

–

Bad planning: how the Engineers got spannered

St Paul’s Road, on the corner of Brunswick Street. The Engineers Arms pub (above) stood here for over 100 years, its bay-windowed frontage surrounded by trees and its beer garden secluded behind high Victorian walls. This monstrous piece of shite is going up in its place.

How the pound signs must have lit up in the developers’ eyes when they got their chance to slap a cheapie block of flats up on this key corner site. But it’s turned out to be a bit of a white (and brown) elephant, standing abandoned and unfinished for some while. It has already had paint thrown over it, such is the contempt and disgust it inspires among local residents.

OK, so St Paul’s is not one of Cheltenham’s nicest places (I know, I used to live there) but it has always kept an authentically earthy 19th century character. That character has taken a hell of a bashing in the last decade, as amongst other things it’s lost its wedge-shaped Victorian malt house, countless tucked-away historic outbuildings (oh so tempting to cram a new house in those spaces) and its imposing old two-tone brick hospital and workhouse. It’s gained a rash of cheap hamster-cage houses, a block of plasticky student flats and a massive parking problem. The southern side now looks out over the butt end of an offensively ugly hotel and multi-storey car park, two unsightly zits which sprang up on the face of the 2006 Brewery redevelopment. Let’s face it, all the crappiest ideas that get shat out the arse end of town planning end up here. And I really think the selfish idiots who dump bad developments on areas where they don’t have to live should give St Paul’s a break now.

If I’d known the Engineers pub was under threat of redevelopment I’d have taken some more photographs of it. As it is, I never expected anyone would want to demolish it, and the side view along St Paul’s Road (at the top of the post) taken towards the end of 2003, when the pub had been derelict for more than a year, is the only one I have. Three months later, it looked like this:

The demolition was a pointless waste. The Engineers was a curious and characterful building. In some ways it looked like a typical residential house of the late 19th century, with bay windows top and bottom and a sloping roofline. But it had a ‘false entrance’, a blocky portal butting up to the pavement which formed a passage to the pub itself, which was set back within its gardens and almost totally obscured by trees.

The pub first opened as the Engineers Arms alehouse in or before 1891, possibly equipped with its own brewery and possibly incorporating parts of an older house, and it was run by the Cheltenham Original Brewery. The landlord back then was Benjamin Ratcliffe, who had handed over to Annie Matilda Walter by 1903, and then through the First World War and the 1920s it was run by Sidney and Emily Tibbles.

It’s always a bad sign when pubs start changing their names. In the 90s the Engineers Arms became the New Engineers for a few years, then briefly flailed as the New Ale House before whimpering out of business in 2002.

The tall Victorian brick wall with its old cast iron name plate was lost. So were all the trees. When it was demolished a network of large cellars was exposed underneath.

Cellars under the Engineers Arms pub site, early 2004

–

This shaft into the cellars was in the driveway into the pub’s courtyard. The hole is roughly 10 or 12ft deep and the passage below extends under the pavement. Photographed in 2004.

It’s interesting in view of a local rumour about underground passageways going under St Paul’s church, almost exactly on the opposite side of the road. Urban myths about subterranean passageways are common in most towns and there’s never been any real evidence that one exists here, but these things often have some basis in reality. The hidden cellars extended some way under the road towards the church. Maybe they add weight to the idea that there was a brewery on site, or maybe they belonged to the house which occupied the site before …

The Engineers itself replaced a Regency-era house, Hamilton Cottage. Don’t be fooled by the word “cottage” … it was a large and prestigious house and dated from the period when it was fashionable to call such things cottages. Hamilton Cottage is depicted very clearly (my label) on the 1820 map, which even details the layout of its extensive gardens.

It was probably built some time after 1806 and pre-dates St Paul’s church and much of the rest of St Paul’s, and was originally surrounded on three sides by fields. It was described in 1820 as being in “a retired airy part of town” – not a description you’d recognise today.

1820 map, showing Hamilton Cottage (the Engineers pub site) in a then almost empty St Paul’s Road, before the church was built. The only street in existence was the southern part of Brunswick Street, originally called Rutland Street. The small terraced houses here were built between 1806 and 1810. Also present but undeveloped is the line of St Paul’s Lane, and the turnpike road to Swindon. The house marked with a ‘g’ at the bottom of the map is 18th century Woodbine Cottage, later known as North Lodge and then Dunalley Lodge, which still survives today, sideways on to the road and well hemmed in by Victorian terraces so you’d hardly know it was there.

I don’t know when or why Hamilton Cottage bit the dust, but a Hamilton reference survives in the name of a Victorian terrace across the street, now part of St Paul’s Road but it still bears its old Hamilton Place nameplate.

–

Photographed December 2008

And at the end of 2008, almost five years after the pub was obliterated, the site is still a mess. Boarded over with hardboard and plastic sheeting, and with bricks missing from around its unfinished windows, the new occupant of this site is a crass intrusion. Look how out of proportion it is to the Victorian terrace on the other side. The Engineers pub had a garden at the front and a courtyard at the back, but this clumsy slab butts right up to the boundary on all sides to squeeze as many units as possible into the available space. Its height is disproportionate and the styling cheap and thoughtless, flat-pack architecture from the bargain bin, and all the style of a Kit-Kat with the chocolate picked off. The front lower corner is built of bricks which don’t match the others, forming a discoloured patch. It isn’t even built yet and already it looks as though a generation of dog wee has soaked up into it. What an insult to the beautiful 1820s Greek Revival architecture it faces across the road. And to St Paul’s residents, who now have to walk past this shameless bulk on a daily basis. And in fact they have to walk on the other side of the road, because the pavement is swallowed up by a Portaloo and corrugated iron sheets, and pedestrians take their lives into their hands trying to get past it.

For gawd’s sake get shot of this junk and all its sorry ilk. Cheltenham deserves better.

–

With thanks to the Gloucestershire Pubs site for information about the pub history.

Tudor Lodge Road

Tudor Lodge is no more. But there is still a road named after it, and the wall in the photo above is the old Tudor Lodge boundary wall, and this neat communal garden is part of Tudor Lodge’s garden. Much of the rest of the garden though has been swallowed up by housing.

Tudor Lodge, from an old photo

To make any sense of how Tudor Lodge Road came to be, you have to look at the history of The Park as a whole.

Many spectacular building projects in Regency Cheltenham changed course (and character) in mid-building, as their owners ran out of money and had to sell up to other developers who imposed their own tastes and vision. The Park was no exception. A beautiful Regency estate focused around a teardrop-shaped curve, the project was initiated in 1831 when the land (open fields in Leckhampton) was bought by a solicitor called Thomas Billings. His ambitious vision is laid out in the map below, made in 1834. The tip of the teardrop was a pleasure ground, and he set up a comprehensive Zoological, Botanical and Horticultural Garden in the rest of it. Sites were drawn out for numerous luxury houses including a crescent of detached villas within the Park itself.

Tudor Lodge Road, which didn’t have a name at that time, is the circular road in the middle of this map extract, along with the straight bits either side of it. I’m not sure what that round spot in the middle is supposed to be … it may have been a small round building or some kind of monument. When Mr Merrett made his map in 1834 he mapped out all the proposed development. The darker blue houses are the ones that had already been built, and the lighter ones were still in development.

1834 map, showing the Park development as it was planned, NOT as it was actually built.

Despite valiant efforts to make it work, the Zoological Garden was not the success that was hoped, and Billings found himself with no choice but to abandon his part-built estate. It was bought by the architect Samuel Whitfield Daukes, who immediately scrumpled up much of Billings’ original plan.

Daukes himself lived in The Park, in Whitfield House, which appears on the 1834 map as the sole “really built” house on the south-west side of the circular road. On taking over the whole project in 1839, he demolished Whitfield House and took over the four building plots adjacent to it, then built a new and much bigger Tudor-Gothic mansion on the site. Called Tudor Lodge. He built it as his own home and it was a spectacular landmark, considered one of his finest works.

1880 map, showing how the Park area actually developed, and the position of ‘Tudor Lo’.

At the tip of The Park teardrop Daukes designed and built Cornerways, an extraordinarily characterful Italianate villa, tall and narrow, cross-shaped and perched right on the junction. The rest of the park area became Fullwood Park, a public pleasure ground with sports facilities and an admission fee.

The big change Daukes made to Tudor Lodge Road, which still didn’t have a name, is that it became semi-circular rather than circular. A lane was run through to Grafton Road, and named Tudor Lodge Drive. And a large fine house was built in the central circle.

There weren’t many other houses built in the road, but it runs down the back and side of some very handsome villas, like in the top photo which shows the backs of houses in neighbouring Painswick Road, and the one below which also fronts onto Painswick Road but has a lovely walled garden in Tudor Lodge Road. All these houses, while not technically in the road itself, make it a very pleasant place to walk down.

Funnily enough, Tudor Lodge Road continued anonymous until 1891. The only name it seems to have had before that is “road to circus”, which wasn’t much use when it turned out not to be a circus.

In one of those lamentable decisions we can only look back on with incomprehension, Tudor Lodge was demolished in 1966 and replaced with modern development. A row of houses was built fronting onto The Park and another in Tudor Lodge Road on what was formerly the garden. So now the road name and the perimeter wall are all that’s left.

The area still has a Victorian charm to it though.

Dereliction: Tripura House

This, unfortunately, is how Cheltenham’s historic buildings are so often treated.
–

Photos taken January 2004

The former Tripura House Indian restaurant in Winchcombe Street has been derelict for a number of years. The restaurant closed some time ago, although it still has its tiled frontage, and the residential area above it is also abandoned.

Until the government takes action to curb the practice of “land-banking”, it’s all too profitable for investors to hang on to empty properties like this while the land accumulates in value. By leaving the buildings in an appalling state of neglect, their condition becomes uninhabitable and it gets easier to get permission to demolish them.

This once magnificent Regency townhouse is in Cheltenham’s conservation area, so permission to redevelop is not a quick and easy process. Fronted with Cotswold stone ashlar, the house is part of a terrace which dates back to the early 1820s. This is not a run-down area … it’s a prime town centre location, so when the house eventually becomes dangerously dilapidated and beyond repair someone will make a huge fat stinky packet replacing it with newbuild flats.

What is the point of having a conservation area when our heritage is squandered like this? With the housing crisis gathering pace, not to mention the sheer affrontery of treating a beautiful building with such contempt and subjecting the people of Cheltenham to the miserable sight of its rotting hulk, the insidious practice of land-banking should be taxed into oblivion and its perpetrators whipped through the streets and pelted with rotting cabbages.

–

Graffiti gallery

Shortly before its demolition, I took this photo of the old Union Workhouse laundry building in Carlton Place with the pigeons clustering ominously along its roof. It seemed rather appropriate that this cursing figure should appear on the wall at the same time.

–

And its companion piece, further along on the same wall.

–

A thoughtful daubing on a wall of the disused Honeybourne Line.

Doomed: The New Penny

Photos taken February 2008

It may not look very much, a scruffy old building awaiting demolition. But this is actually a very lovely old traditional pub which has stood on the corner of Gloucester Road and Millbrook Street since at least the early part of the 19th century. Underneath the boards and metal screens it still has its beautiful original mullioned windows. Inside there are many more original features.

Originally the New Inn, in its last incarnation the pub was known as the New Penny, named in 1970 to commemorate the switch to decimal currency. It wasn’t one of Cheltenham’s finest … it was noisy on Saturday nights and may have had one or two drug issues. But the building was full of character and still had an unspoiled rear yard and a mature walled garden with very old fruit trees. It’s been derelict since the middle of 2005 when the pub ceased trading and has since been allowed to fall into increasingly poor condition.

–

The demolition proposal was submitted by Evans Jones Planning on behalf of RS Developments of Gloucester, whose intention is to build two blocks of flats on the site. As if Gloucester Road needs any more cram-’em-in hamster-cage flats. There’s some jolly marketing bilge on their website about the much needed “investment of capital” to “improve” the area, but no mention of where the occupants of 14 flats are going to park their cars at this already congested crossroads, or why it’s necessary to demolish a 200-year-old building, other than for the whiffy stink of cash.

–

Gloucester Road has had a bad time with ugly redevelopment over the last five years. Maybe the town planners think that as the area has already been spoiled it doesn’t matter what else they slap up. Or maybe they’ve never bothered to visit the place and haven’t seen the fruits of their rubberstamping. The redevelopment of the Calcutta Inn site (just a few hundred yards from the New Penny) is an atrocious example of ugly, disproportionate planning. After demolishing the landmark curved Regency corner building with chequered bricks which had been a post office for many years before it was a pub, a grotesquely oversized white slab of modern concrete was rammed in against the end of the Victorian terrace, crammed with miniscule “luxury apartments” with tiny prison-like windows, rudely barging against a pair of cottages on its east side. An eyesore for the whole length of Gloucester Road due to its huge size and sore thumb design, it’s known locally as the Communist Block because it looks like it came from behind the Iron Curtain.

Just the other side of the New Penny, another landmark building, the former Gloucester Road school, was also lost to developers in 2003 despite a vigorous campaign to save it. At least in that instance they made an effort to replace it with housing which was in proportion to the site, but the loss of the original building (which was used as a Red Cross hospital in WW1, treating wounded soldiers straight from the front line) is in itself a blight on the area.

–

A curlicue shadow cast by the iron bracket which formerly held the pub’s sign. Underneath the boards are the original square-paned mullions.

–

Ceramic plaque built into the front wall of the pub to indicate that it served real ales from Cheltenham’s local brewery. West Country Ales was an amalgamation of the Stroud Brewery with the Cheltenham Brewery. Will this historic item of street furniture be saved?

–

Old iron bracket supporting the brickwork on the back wall of one of the outbuildings. The bricks were hand made in those days, hence all the variations in colour.

–

Round the back, photographed from Old Millbrook Terrace. Demolition work has already begun with the destruction of the original 1800s brick wall which formed the walled garden. A temporary mesh fence takes its place.

–

The view through the mesh. This is the back of the pub with its courtyard and outbuildings. The upper storey of the larger one was originally a hayloft, and the smaller building may have been a stable.

–

Wreckage of the walled garden. The wall is spread across the ground as hardcore. Only one of the gnarled old fruit trees is still standing. Gloucestershire was once a major apple growing area, but the loss of individual old trees like this have left many of the county’s native varieties at the point of extinction. I don’t suppose anybody knows whether this one is an endangered variety or not.

The New Penny could so easily have been renovated and cared for. Those who took the decision to destroy this characterful nugget of Cheltenham’s heritage should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves.