The buildings of Watlands Park

This section is going to feel like a building site for a while as we gather information, especially from the house deeds residents are kindly making available.

What we know so far:

The shape of the estate. There’s some debate about where Watlands Park should begin and end. It would be possible in theory to extend its boundaries as far as Bradwell Lodge in one direction and The Crescent, on Dimsdale Parade, in the other. However history and architectural character say clearly that the heart of the estate consists of Park Avenue to the corner of Clarence Street, Woodland Avenue (originally Woodlands Parade), Watlands Avenue, Marsh Avenue (originally Marsh Road), Albert Terrace (all of which began as gated private roads, Park and Woodland keeping their gates till World War II) and the tree-lined section of the High Street (known for a while as Porthill Avenue) between St Andrew’s church and Keeling Street. Those are more or less the Conservation Area boundaries agreed by Newcastle Council in 2016 (we did try for more initially), and so that’s the area this study concentrates on. For clarity, modern road names will be used.

Watlands Park was developed in two main phases. The first phase, from the 1870s to the 1920s, saw the piecemeal development of the Watlands House grounds – Park Avenue first, Watlands Avenue last – as land was sold off as building plots in gradual stages. The second phase, between around 1960 and 1980, saw a new, more densely spaced generation of houses added as large properties either damaged by subsidence or worth more as development land were replaced by several smaller ones, and gardens and at least two tennis courts built on.

Park Avenue was the first to be built, initially just on the west-facing side, with views of the remaining parkland, hence the name. Woodland Avenue and the section of Albert Terrace between Park and Marsh Way followed soon afterwards. The character of the estate was carefully planned – whether for a balanced mix or to encourage aspirational buyers to spend more is a good question. Plots, single and double, were sold with a stipulation as to how far houses must stand back from the roadway. This varied between the avenues.

As the most prestigious and expensive, Park had the widest plots and required the deepest front gardens, which maintains much of its original sylvan character nearly a century and a half later, though at the expense of uneexpectly small back gardens – compensated before the garden grabs by some large ones at the side on the double plots – 5 Park is the best remaining original example after the side garden of 7 was razed.

Woodland, next step down, had generally narrower plots and medium-sized front gardens. Houses in both avenues had to be either detached or semi-detached.

Only the Marsh Way-to-Park end of Albert was allowed short runs of town houses, with smaller front gardens stipulated and more variable back garden depth – the long Albert gardens which have escaped being built on are the best on the estate.

Houses on these three thoroughfares, and later on Watlands Avenue, were individually designed, though there are family resemblances. The variation in styles within avenues and between neighbouring houses or pairs of houses is partly a lucky accident of history. Because of the vagaries of the pottery trade, which provided the majority of Watlands Park’s early promoters, financiers, land speculators, homeowners and renters, a twenty-year gap between the sale of plots wasn’t exceptional. For example the present (originally houses were numbered in the other direction) 7 and 9 Woodland Avenue were built in 1882, with 3 and 5 built in 1908, all by the same architect but the generation between makes them very different houses.

3 and 5 Woodland Avenue

7 (obscured) and 9 Woodland Avenue

Marsh and rest of Albert have the smallest front garden requirement and the highest degree of uniformity. Typically though not invariably houses come from a builder’s pattern book rather than a one-off or bespoke design – but the results are again part of the overall plan for the estate. The longest run of more or less identical houses, the semis on the west-facing side of Marsh, not only makes a fine vista seen from either end but also draws a clear line to say this was where the private estate ended, beyond this point you were in the older, humbler mish-mash of Wolstanton (noting that at the turn of the twentieth century newly-developed Porthill was the prestigious address, although Wolstanton was a Domesday village and centre of a large urban district).

Marsh Avenue

The section of Albert Terrace between Marsh Way and Silverdale Road is made up of short terraces of villa-sized houses with, again, more variation of styles, and heights than you find in similar streets in the area.

Albert Terrace looking towards Park Avenue

The result was an unusual and really healthy balance. Even though the estate was overtly exclusive, there was a social mix engineered into it from the start so that for example a commercial traveller or clerk at the ‘smaller’ end of Albert Terrace could live only a couple of hundred yards from his employer in Park Avenue or the High Street (where the grandest houses proclaimed their status by having no pavement in front, so the lower orders couldn’t look inside but had to walk on the other side of the road – hence the narrow pavements today).

Watlands Park in its pomp was essentially the best suburb of Burslem and expressed the town’s social mix: a small middle-class estate for the small middle class of a small town, classically placed to the West of its industry so the prevailing winds would blow the smoke the other way – but at that time, a phenomenally creative town for its size. Hence the design quality of many of our buildings. The estate was Burslem’s (and its smaller brother Tunstall’s) image of itself and equally, its advertisement for itself. If a foreign customer (bear in mind at this point Tunstall had an American consul to faciliate the volume of pottery business done between the two countries) was invited home to dine, the house’s style and quality had to be of a piece with the design-led ceramics on offer.

– insert a picture of Burslem c.1900 –

No coincidence perhaps that Watlands Park’s principal architect (from what we know so far) Absalom Reade Wood Absalom Reade Wood (1851 – 1922) was a member of the Wood earthenware dynasty, established in Burslem (via, as ever in the pottery trade, several changes of fortune and corporate structure) since the 18th century. Other members of the family lived on Park Avenue for many years. AR Wood did more than anyone else to shape the Northern part of the Potteries. After years of relative neglect, many of his public and industrial buildings are nationally listed: the iconic Middleport Pottery (1888), Burslem School of Art (which plays an important role in Watlands Park’s history) (1905), Victoria Hall, Kidsgrove (1897), the majority of Tunstall’s (where Wood was Borough Surveyor) public buildings including the layout of Victoria Park (1897-1908) and a number of chapels and factories.

Middleport Pottery

Burslem School of Art

Tunstall Park

No study has been made of Wood’s private houses: we’re breaking important new ground here.

Hillcrest, at the High Street end of Woodland Avenue, was Wood’s own house from 1891 to his death in 1922.

Hillcrest, Woodland Avenue (2017)

At the Albert Terrace end, Newstead was built for his daughter as a wedding present in 1912.

Newstead, Woodland Avenue (2017)

When Wood’s name appears in a house’s history, the strong supposition is he was also its architect – either as owner of land before building, as at 3 and 5 Woodland Avenue (1908) – or as landlord, as at 7, originally West View, Woodland Avenue (1882): just to really complicate things he appears from the 1891 census to have been living at 7 as a tenant immediately before moving over the road to Hillcrest, but then bought it in 1901 as an investment from his old neighbour, Charles Billington, at number 9: Billington originally commissioned and owned both semis. Further down Woodland and at junction of Marsh and Albert, two more pairs of semis are clearly pared-down, smaller copies of 7 and 9 Woodland, which strongly suggests Wood again. Visual evidence and family connexions also suggest Wood as potential architect of 3 and 5 Park, and what’s now the Co-op Funeral Home at 1 Park.

 

1 Park Avenue (2017)

3 Park Avenue (2017)

3 and 5 Park Avenue (2017)

7 Park Avenue (2017)

9 Park Avenue (2017)

Wood also designed the estate’s parish church, St Andrew’s Porthill (currently unlisted and as far as anyone knows, his only Anglican church). St. Andrew’s Church, Porthill

There are near-complete original Wood interiors at Newstead and 9 Woodland.

This wide range of types and styles of building, over a long career, illustrates one of the problems (but a fascinating one) about making a study of AR Wood: he’s an architect without a distinctive signature. His qualities are subtler, perhaps also more commercially pragmatic. He follows fashion, adapting it to his client’s brief (later in his career with heavy participation by his assistants, Yorath and Goldstraw – the firm of Wood Goldstraw Yorath LLP is still in business). His exceptional quality is the way he places his buildings in his native Potteries landscape, most impressively in the way Burslem School of Art and Kidsgrove Victoria Hall work with the rise and fall of the land around them.

Kidsgrove Town Hall

He’s also very good at managing scale, and blending new buildings with old. Once we know for sure how many – and various – Wood houses we have in Watlands Park, those qualities may well be seen to apply here too.

Reginald Thelwall Longden (1879-1941), in contrast, is consistently distinctive and often charismatic. Again he worked on industrial – Moorcroft Pottery, for example – and public – the George Hotel, Burslem – commissions locally but his reputation rests principally on his private houses. Early in his career he achieved international recognition when two of his designs were chosen for Romford Garden Suburb (now known as Gidea Park), a model garden suburb built in 1910-11 as the result of open competition.

Romford Garden Suburb (Gidea Park)

Longden was in very good company: other architects represented include include Clough Williams Ellis, MH Baillie Scott and (from a later competition) Berthold Lubetkin. Longden lived and worked in Leek for much of his life, but always keeping an office in Burslem, where he grew up and taught as a young man. Several Longden houses in Leek are listed and although he worked in a variety of styles – for example a splendid 1912 Queen Anne-style mansion on the edge of Brough Park was recently on the market – he remained essentially an Arts & Crafts architect throughout his career.

Bettyswood

Longden’s especial take on half-timbering and red brick, his oversized fluted chimneys, bevelled brick mullions and sense of detail are characteristic. In Newcastle (where he re-established his business after bankruptcy in Leek) some of the best large houses in the old part of the Westlands are his. In Watlands Park we have one certain Longden house, built for the Arrowsmith family at the corner of Watlands Avenue and Clarence Street, and one highly probable but still to be confirmed at 9 Park.

Longden House, Watlands Avenue

Reginald Longden’s father, John Jabez Longden, was a speculative builder who appears to have been one of the developers, and probably the main contractor, of the fine 1904 run of large semis on the west-facing side of Watlands Avenue. They’re more traditional than Reginald Longden’s later work, but as an architect in his mid-20s and still learning the business, it’s not unreasonable to think he may have played a part.

Watlands Avenue

Reginald Longden spent his last years at Huntly, 19 Park Avenue – not one of his designs but the bigger half of the first pair of houses built on Watlands Park in 1877 for Alfred Boulton, a solicitor and one of the estate’s investor-developers.

19 Park Avenue

The third architect – or architects – we know least about so far. Ford & Slater were a Burslem firm who worked widely in the area. They built and lived at Inglewood, on the corner of the High Street opposite 1 Park, with its splendid arched gateway and coach house. Gerald Slater was still there in the 1980s and still working into his 80s with an office in Overhouse Chambers, Burslem.

Inglewood (2017)

LOST HOUSES

The Wolstanton Fault (due for its own write-up in due course) changed the face of Watlands Park in the mid-20th century. At least three original properties became uninhabitable due to subsidence, though with remedial underpinning work their gardens proved safe for building land. The larger Woodland Avenue house, on the west side next to Hillcrest was used for some time before demolition as National Coal Board offices, perhaps as part of a compulsory purchase or compensation deal.

We don’t yet have images of those lost houses but there is a 1951 picture, taken immediately before demolition, of 1 Woodland Avenue, also on the fault line and with the extent of settlement clearly visible (the plank in front of the house is perpendicular, unlike the house itself). An electricity substation and garages now stand on the site, hopefully with a strong concrete platform underneath.

1 Woodland Avenue pre demolition

Another large Park Avenue house to go, a little later in the mid-1970s, stood opposite Huntly and the Park/Albert corner.

Albert Terrace looking towards Park Avenue

This demolition appears to have been a purely commercial decision, since – unlike the two houses above – the property was offered on the open market as a dwelling house but in the end its double plot must have made better sense economically as building land and planners of that time can’t have felt the house was worth preserving.

Of the larger houses converted for commercial or institutional use, only Renford House, on the High Street/Woodland corner opposite the Co-op, has been so heavily modified from its original form that it could perhaps be regarded as a lost house. Hillcrest, on the other High Street/Woodland corner and its neighbour the present Co-op Funeral Home have been added to rather than modified with the result that they’re still firmly themselves, as is 20 Woodland Avenue, which has been in care/institutional use for many years.

20 Woodland Avenue (2017)

CONSERVATION

When the first Conservation Areas in England were designated in 1967, Victorian and Edwardian houses weren’t regarded as a priority. In London the recently-established Victorian Society had failed to save the iconic Euston Arch; in Newcastle-under-Lyme a passionate campaign to save the Municipal Hall failed. Victorian architecture was a specialist interest until fashions came around again in the 1980s and until then, somewhere like Watlands Park where – as Liz Thomas describes in her interview – the houses were regarded as too big for 2.4 child families, too run-down, too expensive to heat and, unless you were lucky and got a well-maintained one, strictly projects for romantics and the brave – may have seemed to be slipping gently into the past. The fact that we didn’t go the same way as Dresden or Cobridge says as much for the community as the built environment: something makes people want to live here, stay on, and come back and raise their own children. Even in a traditional area like North Staffordshire that’s rare. We have a history of long, in some cases lifelong, residencies, either in the same house or moving around the estate.

Mid-century economics were hard on houses, though. A number were converted into flats, some – for example the delightful 1958 glazed outside staircase at 3 Woodland – very successfully, others less so.

3 Woodland Avenue (2018)

The long residencies and – good news – what seems a disproportionate number of long lives here often meant neglected houses as residents got older and incomes reduced. Houses not completely wrecked by land settlement – undermining as well as the fault – still sustained some damage. The DIY boom helped, but its limitation was that while it became easier to decorate and do some structural work yourself, enabling owner-occupiers on modest incomes to make a house habitable and generally freshen it up, the available materials were all modern and so apt to date quickly. Trying to restore one of our older houses to its former glory would have been prohibitively expensive until the market for salvage and repro items got going properly from the mid-80s. The 1960s and 70s were also the heyday of dire quality Scandinavian softwood, so any windows or doors replaced then – and the woodwork on the modern infill properties – barely lasted a generation, whereas properly maintained original pitch pine joinery was capable of lasting a century or more.

Paradoxically, since conservationists are usually sniffy about it, the double-glazing boom probably did more than anything to improve the quality of life for Watlands Park houses and in many ways, conserve them. With coal fires replaced by central heating (courtesy of smokeless zones, very necessary at the time), houses easily got damp without their chimneys in constant use. Rotted and non-operational sash windows made the problem twice as bad and were uneconomic to replace like for like. A properly insulated home made all the difference. On the other hand the first generation of aluminium and uPVC windows and doors didn’t remotely resemble Victorian and Edwardian ones, so the superficial look of the estate changed and a number of houses were permanently damaged from a purist’s point of view.

Albert Terrace looking towards Park Avenue at the junction of Marsh Avenue(1980’s)

But since double-glazed units are a relatively short life product and it’s now possible to get uPVC windows that come close to replicating original Victorian and Edwardian patterns, in most cases the look need only be a temporary issue whether or not owners choose to restore with fully original materials.

As of 2016, Watlands Park belatedly became a Conservation Area conservation area proposal. This has many benefits in terms of protecting the character of our estate, but drawbacks too in terms of extra red tape, more extensive in the case of properties and boundary walls with Article 4 Designations in recognition of their especial architectural and heritage value. It gives our trees better protection than the old Tree Preservation Orders, which were still based on a 1960s plan. But most importantly, it shifts a balance of power about who the estate belongs to. The Conservation Area campaign began in response to the proposal by absentee owner/developers to grab the garden of 7 Park Avenue and greatly damage the character of one of the original Watlands Park houses by converting the property into too many flats without proper parking arrangements.

7 Park Avenue (2017)

It took that threat to make enough of us realise how strongly we felt about a place we’d maybe taken for granted. The Residents’ Association campaign to save 7 Park Avenue’s original structure succeeded, and establishing the Conservation Area in its wake makes a statement that we’ve come full circle. Of course appropriate development is welcome, an estate locked in the past would be a living death, it has to keep evolving. But a century and a half ago Watlands Park belonged, literally, to its developers. Now it belongs to the people who live here. Conversation areas

MORE INFORMATION PLEASE

Anything you know about any of the Watlands Park houses, however small or anecdotal, is incredibly welcome please, whether or not you still live in that house.

At the moment we especially need more information on: 3, 5, 7, 9, 21 and 23 Park Avenue

21 Park Avenue (2018)

23 Park Avenue (2018)

and 14, 16, 18 and 20 Watlands Avenue

insert pics of 14,16,18,20 Watlands

83-85 Albert Terrace (2017)

Most of the modern houses. They’re no less important to the history project than the older ones and are harder to find information about without deeds since the most recent available census is 1911. 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of the information about the Watlands Park’s origins comes from Andrew Dobraszczyc’s WEA course handouts of c 1990, still warmly remembered by older residents.

The rest comes from Sukey Fisher’s own research and conversations with residents; any inadvertent errors are hers and she’d love to have them corrected if someone knows better.

Period photographs of Watlands Park are all courtesy of Mervyn Edwards apart from the picture of 1 Woodland Avenue, which is reproduced from Neil Collingwood’s Unseen Newcastle-under-Lyme (Stroud, 2014).

Modern photographs are taken by Seth Thomas in 2016 and Robert Pearson in 2018.

Sukey Fisher

June 2018