St Giles Hill Park in Winchester – the extension of 1895

For his generosity Lord Northbrook was issued with a certificate featuring heraldic devices including the Northbrook crest of the time, Probitate et Labore, or by Honesty and Labour. The document also shows a view of the Hill including Prospect Cottage which stood on the site until demolished in 1965.

The elaborate document would have taken a lot of time and effort compared to using a computer graphics application today and the aim would be to impress.  How else would the gratitude be shown?  Was there ever a plaque or monument, too?   

The certificate reads: 

To the Right Honourable Thomas George, Earl of Northbrook, Knight Grand Commander of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India, Lord Lieutenant of the County of Hampshire, High Steward of the City of Winchester: 

We, the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Winchester in Council Assembled desire to convey to your Lordship our grateful thanks for the very valuable Gift you have made to the City of a piece of Land on the North West slope of St Giles Hill, together with the Cottage standing thereon.  We recognise how greatly the convenience and beauty of the Hill will be enhanced by your generosity of which it will for all time be an ever present memorial. 

Dated 3 May 1894 and signed by Thomas Stopher, Mayor and Walter Bailey, Town Clerk. 

Later in1894 Henry Ernest Milner was engaged by Winchester Corporation to provide a design for this additional part of St Giles Hill Park given by Lord Northbrook and nearest to the city.  H E Milner was a well-established, leading landscape architect based in Westminster, London.  In 1890 he had published The Art and Practice of Landscape Gardening.   He was second generation in the business of design, his father Edward Milner having been apprenticed to Joseph Paxton and having then gone on to design gardens such as The Pavilion Gardens in Buxton and projects such as supervising the re-erection of the Crystal Palace when moved from Hyde Park.

H E Milner’s plan produced for Winchester is well thought out taking in the topography and possibilities, but it would be deemed superficial and inadequate today when multiple drawings, construction drawings, planting plans, project schedules and subsequent management plans and detailed costing would form the set of materials for a project.  In Milner’s plan we have little more than would be considered a design concept.  It is nonetheless not atypical of the times. 

The plan, for instance, is even lacking the compass rose showing cardinal directions, though someone has written N and S in pencil on the plan held in the Archives to help them interpret it.  This may not have been a problem for the mayor and councillors of the time but orienting this plan to the present day is a little more difficult, so let me help.  More or less the left side of Milner’s plan is North and to the right therefore South.  This makes the top East and the bottom West.  The mnemonic “Never Eat Shredded Wheat” comes in handy here. (I eat Bitesize Shredded Wheat every day so I don’t espouse practising the mnemonic, but it is useful, nonetheless.)

Let’s interpret the plan to what we recognise today. Starting at the bottom you will see Morn Hill Road named.  This is the road which today leads up the hill from the mini roundabout by The Chesil Restaurant and heads off to Morn Hill, Magdalen Down and Alresford.  In signage terms today from the mini roundabout firstly we have Bridge Street and after it turns left up the hill it is signed as Magdalen Hill and later after turning right beyond the junction with Blue Ball Hill and just off to the left of Milner’s Plan it becomes signed as Alresford Road. This means that for Morn Hill Road one should read Magdalen Hill today.

On the bottom right of the plan the road/path heading West-East from the start of Milner’s signature to the top right of the plan is that between the block of St Swithun’s Court today, depicted by a blank square on Milner’s Plan and the properties to the right (South) named Pipe Kiln Court, Beeching House (a great name with a nice nod of irony towards the now closed railway below it, by the way) and Prospect House today.  These properties are just blank on Milner’s Plan as outside the scope of his proposal. This route is the one currently signposted to the St Giles Hill viewpoint and is the most direct and, with every year passing as any local person will tell you, is also as the steepest ascent of the Hill from the city. 

On Milner’s plan you will see the old mortuary is labelled.  The access gates to the mortuary are now bent and chained with the full route to it behind St Swithun’s Court overgrown with brambles.  The mortuary itself has long since gone. 

Milner depicts another building in pink on the plan but without any label.  This building may be identified as Prospect Cottage from other sources.  It was demolished in 1965. The dense vegetation today obliterates any sign of it, though.  

The main entrance to the Park area designed by Milner and mentioned in his short letter to the mayor accompanying his plan is about 70 feet (21m) up the hill of Morn Hill Road (Magdalen Hill, today) from the route signposted up the Hill today, as described in the last paragraph. It is most understandable that Milner proposed a much more elegant entrance to the Park with a sweeping, more serpentine and gently ascending route. The proposed entrance route was more appealing compared to an entrance which also went towards the mortuary rather than towards an elegant park for recreation. Milner, you will see was determined to hide the mortuary, and the other building on site from sight with copious screening planting.    

The curved entrance pathway joins the pathway that then wiggles more or less North-South following the contour somewhat.  In his letter Milner notes that the “natural formation of the ground” is somewhat deterministic to routes but even though there may well have been a pre-existing path hereabouts, Milner no doubt proposes the curvaceousness associated with parks where such non-linear approaches are preferred over straight lines.  Curves tend to lend themselves to leisurely perambulation over more direct routes which are generally approached at greater pace with the journey rather than the destination as the key focus. 

The handwritten letter to the mayor accompanying the drawing outlines the thinking behind the plan and provides the costings all in less than 350 words.  To return to my earlier point, this is quite amazing.  Today such documents would form a pile of documents and not that which might be covered easily on one side of A4. 

Regarding planting, the plan seems to show some small-scale ornamental planting in two areas either side of where the paths intersect but otherwise we have mainly clumps of trees depicted with gaps for vistas and of turfed grassland, the fashion then being that of control rather than more natural approaches taken today. 

The entire planting scheme is described in one sentence in that it “should consist of flowering trees and shrubs, suitable for the site and soil”.  Again, compared to today this is jaw dropping in its brevity and sadly doesn’t provide the sort of detail that one would have liked. We can take it that by “flowering trees” Milner is referring to deciduous rather than coniferous trees and this is apparent in the tree scape on the ground.  Some trees will have come and gone and some more invasive types will have entered the fray.  The holly fringing the tree clumps today, for instance, will no doubt have been a result of bird droppings rather than by design.

On the plan next to the fence a covered seat is labelled by Milner and is referenced in his letter.  This seat has long gone but its position was perfect with a great view to the city between the framing clumps of trees. 

Given the sweeping generality of the plan the answer to making it happen is that Milner recommends “that the corporation employ one of my skilled foremen to superintend with local labour under his control”.  With such a generalised plan offered there could be little choice to make this happen as envisaged by the designer other than to have the project led by someone who largely employs their own intellectual property and experience as so little is committed to paper.

Perhaps the most staggering difference from a tender response that one would see today with all its detailed specifications, spreadsheets and terms, conditions and caveats is the way that the way that the cost is conveyed.  “Cost including unclimbable iron fencing enclosing the area with entrance gates, forming undulating ground, cost of trees and shrubs and planting, making and asphalting (tar) walks, turfing and generally finishing according to plan at £490”. That would be over £50,000 in 2023 just based on the inflation and not taking into account how specific elements might have inflated and spent in addition.  

Milner’s drawings made in December 1894 with his letter dated 31 December 1894 would have arrived early January 1895.  The Recreation and Grounds Committee agreed to the plan on 10 January 1895 which is an incredible time frame compared to today.  They even noted some urgency in the Minutes of the Committee as work was to start at once “to provide labour for the unemployed during the present severe weather” with the costs noted as to be simply included in further estimates of Council spending. 

By the end of January work commences with Milner writing to the Town Clerk on 21 January 1895 to say that next Wednesday one of his best men would arrive to superintend the project and was to be paid 50 shillings per week with 3 shillings per week for lodging and railway fare, “beyond which there was no charge”.

Milner’s letter included all materials most of which would have been supplied locally, including the fine gates and fencing of this area still present and made at Jewell and Sons Iron Foundry in Winchester, that were not seemingly removed for the war effort.  However, supervision and labour cost was in addition to the £490 for materials.  The costs of this labour could have been as much as materials and so when added up at today’s cost the overall costs would have been over £80,000 and considerably upwards from this.  How different, then.  In 1895 the merest of outline designs was submitted by a single supplier and a subcommittee nodded through a big budget expenditure about a week later for a project which then commenced less than three weeks after that. 

Fast forward to today and this Milner designed section of the Park is about a fifth of St Giles Hill Park.  Much has changed and although further research both via the archives and by observation on the ground will tell us more, the Milner designed section of the Park is the part we may end up with most knowledge about.  There aren’t such original documents for other parts, where there isn’t direct evidence of Milner’s hand but such may be found one day.

In other parts of the St Giles Hill Park the pathways are more practical, sometimes informal and less curvaceous. The original planting is less formal.  Coniferous trees such as Corsican Pine and Yew have been employed.  This differs from Milner’s work in the North East corner of the Park that we have been considering from his plan drawing and letters.  Elsewhere in the Park there are nonetheless some superb compositional elements such as using distance, space and the borrowed landscape.  Viewpoints to St Catherine’s Hill and the City are superb, for instance.  All in all, some parts of the Park will benefit from restoration but other parts need to be viewed from twenty first century perspectives balancing the needs of all flora, fauna, humans and nature in particular, bearing in mind the rapidly changing climate.  

The Park remains a great asset to the City and the Council is pursuing considerable works on it in its 5-year management plan approved in March 2023.  Views are being reinstated and considerable tree work undertaken not least to tackle ash dieback and plant better suited replacement trees.  From the end of August 2023, the Friends of St Giles Hill charity established in April 2023 is playing its part with Working Parties on the Hill with more ambitious aspirations for the Park to follow.  For more details see https://www.friendsofstgileshillpark.org/about.

Dr Harry Mycock