Brown Hart Gardens

“Good feeling among the neighbours”

Published in the The London Gardener, Vol. no. 25, 2021

The intriguing raised square that is Brown Hart Gardens is tucked in between the mansions of Grosvenor Square and the consumer honeypot of Oxford Street. It belongs to neither and yet is perfectly integrated into the fabric and history of this part of Mayfair while at the same time being entirely independent in its originality. This ‘queer hiatus’ [1] provides respite to the weary shopper and intimacy to the Mayfair flâneur after the grandeur of its neighbours to the south. It is also a critical part of the power supply infrastructure of West London.

The square as we see it today was built by Charles Stanley Peach in 1903-5 and refurbished and added to by BDP in 2013 (fig. 1). On closer inspection, these ‘gardens’ are an electricity substation (extending 40 feet below ground), which can be glimpsed through Diocletian windows at street level (fig. 2). The roof of the substation takes the form of a balustraded Italianate terrace with neo-Roman baroque gazebos at either end (used as access to the substation) and a contemporary pavilion housing a café. The original steep stairs up to the garden have been supplemented by a more friendly and accessible arrangement, again contemporary, to the north.

1. Brown Hart Gardens, 2021 (Courtesy © Laura Hodgson)

2. Brown Hart Gardens, c. 1905 (Private Collection)

The garden forms the centrepiece of what is now the Peabody Estate (originally the Improved Industrial Dwellings Company) to its north and south, and is framed to the west by Wimperis and Simpson’s 1920s stripped classical garage that has become the elegant Beaumont Hotel (with its appended Anthony Gormley suite peering down onto the gardens (fig. 3) and to the east by Alfred Waterhouse’s terracotta and red brick Romanesque confection, the King’s Weigh House Chapel of 1889-91 (now the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral of the Holy Family in Exile).

Pevsner perfectly describes this part of Mayfair as an ‘unexpected enclave of artisan housing’.[2] When coming from the south, you cross Grosvenor Square, the grand centrepiece of Thomas Barlow’s master plan of 1720 for the development of Sir Richard Grosvenor’s Hundred Acres estate into what we now know as Mayfair, and still London’s most opulent garden square. And then suddenly, and also very delightfully, ‘the grand show peters out’ [3] as we enter Duke Street with its charming one-off shops (such as the London Guitar Studio or the fragrant premises of H R Higgins (Coffee Man)) and intimately-proportioned buildings. Barely a hundred yards after leaving the magnificence of Grosvenor Square we reach the bohemian intimacy of Brown Hart Gardens. And – only a block away to the north – Oxford Street throbs away in all its vulgar glory, another world again.

This part of Mayfair has always been textured. Duke Street was part of the original layout of the Mayfair, but from the beginning provided much of the practical infractructure for the neighbourhood with modest houses occupied by builders and tradesmen, at one point a hospital for married and unmarried mothers, and by 1790 ‘just one resident MP and one other esquire’ [4] but three public houses.

3. The Beaumont Hotel’s Gormley suite peering down into the gardens, 2021 (Courtesy © Laura Hodgson)

4. Plaque in honour of Hugh Lupus, First Duke of Westminster, 2021 (Courtesy © Laura Hodgson)

In the early nineteenth century this was an area of warehouses, workshops and small trades such as dressmakers.[5] By the 1880s, the area had degraded into a ‘network of slums in which a special police patrol had to be on duty’.[6]

Then, in 1886-89, the Grosvenor Estate undertook the redevelopment of much of this area, with Duke Street itself receiving private apartments, but the majority of the neighbourhood being turned into affordable housing for the Improved Industrial Dwellings Co. If you stand on the south side of Brown Hart Gardens and look across to Chesham Buildings, you will see an elegant art nouveau plaque of 1899 in honour of Hugh Lupus, First Duke of Westminster (fig. 4):

Lessor to the Improved Industrial Dwellings Coy. Ltd of this and other buildings on his London estate accommodating nearly 4000 persons of the working class. The friend and benefactor of his poorer brethren.

Significantly, the new scheme included a communal garden [7] for these brethren (fig. 5), also provided by the Duke of Westminster and designed by the eminent landscape gardener and contractor Joseph Fyfe Meston (1827-91). Meston had been an assistant to the landscape gardener Robert Marnock. He latterly collaborated with Alexander McKenzie on the design of the Victoria Embankment Gardens (1870), rearranged and beautified Bedford Square for Francis Russell, ninth Duke of Bedford (1874), and was associated with the architects Willaim Nesfield and Norman Shaw. His garden in Mayfair was was equipped with a drinking fountain and a urinal, and planted with trees (fig. 6). Though very much a product of Victorian munificence rather than Georgian real estate speculation, this communal garden continued the tradition of the Mayfair garden square started with its rich cousin, Grosvenor Square. And while Grosvenor Square had originally been planned as a secure enclosure for its key-holding residents, Duke Street Gardens (as it was first known) was open.[8]

5. Lease plan, 1888, showing the original Duke Street Gardens marked as a ‘Playground’ (Courtesy Grosvenor Archives at City of Westminster Archives)

6. Detail of map showing communal gardens with Drinking Fountain, Urinal and central pavilion. Ordnance Survey Second Edition, 5 feet to 1 mile, London Sheet vii.61, published 1894-96 (Reproduced under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (cc-by) licence with the permission of the National Library of Scotland. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Charles Booth’s notebooks of 1899 [9] record:

The space [...] between Brown and Hart Streets is laid out as an open space given for the purpose by the Duke. The people of the district have dubbed it “Little Grosvenor Sq”. [One inhabitant] appeared to take a genuine pride in the improvements of this spot.

In 1890-1, the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation (WESC) had, under a lease from the Grosvenor Estate, built a power generating station at the corner of Duke Street and Weighhouse Streets designed by Peach (fig. 7). In 1902 WESC approached the Grosvenor Estate with a scheme to replace Duke Street Gardens with a large substation with gardens on top. This proposal appears to have been the subject of some debate. It was no surprise that local residents were resistant to the scheme, but there had also been complaints about the trouble caused by ‘disorderly boys’, ‘verminous women’ and ‘tramps’ in the old garden, and so in the end (and reputedly over port shared between Peach and the Duke) the lease was granted to WESC to build the substation but with assurances to residents that new trees in tubs would be installed on the roof garden10 (fig. 8). The use of tubs has continued ever since, their designs changing with the prevailing aesthetic (fig. 9).

7. King’s Weigh House Church, 1892, by Bedford Lemere. The original Duke Street Gardens are visible in the foreground while, in the background, rises the chimney of the Davies Street power station, also designed by Peach (Courtesy Historic England Archive)

8. Brown Hart Gardens, c. 1905. The first of many tub designs for the trees – a solid barrel (Courtesy Westminster City Archives)

9. Brown Hart Gardens, c. 1928. The tree tubs are now decidedly Art Deco in appearance, matching Wimperis and Simpson’s newly constructed garage (not visible) (Courtesy Grosvenor Archives at City of Westminster Archives)

And so the structure we know today was built from 1903-5 for the considerable sum of £90,000 and formally opened by the Mayor of Westminster, Lord Cheylesmore, in 1906.

Charles Stanley Peach, ‘Pioneer in Power’

Charles Stanley Peach (1858-1934) has been described as a ‘Pioneer in Power’. [11] Born on a boat returning from India, Peach began by studying medicine. After a year, he abandoned his studies and left for the Eastern Rockies to participate in a United States Government survey of a ‘country [...] still wild and uncultivated and inhabited only by encampments of Red Indians, where now are large and prosperous cities.’[12] After a serious riding accident, Peach returned to England and spent two years (1882-3) in the office of architect Hugh Roumieu Gough F.R.I.B.A.

Peach’s apprenticeship as an architect coincided with the beginning of public electricity supply in Britain. In 1884, when the 25-year-old Peach set up his own practice, opportunities in the power sector were immense. The Electric Lighting Act 1882 had enabled the supply of electricity to the public by private companies and local authorities and, in the same year, Thomas Edison had opened the world’s first coal-fired power station at 57 Holborn Viaduct.

Peach knew many of the leading electrical engineers of his time, among them Ferranti and Crompton, and soon became the preferred architect for the numerous companies setting up electricity supply systems around Britain, completing around seventy power infrastructure buildings during his career.

In 1904, just as Brown Hart Gardens was nearing completion, Peach delivered a paper to the Royal Institute of British Architects, ‘Notes on the Design and Construction of Buildings connected with the Generation and Supply of Electricity’. [13]

The paper is a remarkable and comprehensive study of good architectural practice in the design of power and substations across the world (Peach had travelled widely in Europe visiting power infrastrusture and corresponded with leading designers in the United States). Peach takes a keen interest in the mechanical and practical aspects of these buildings, in particular with regard to fire risk and vibration, and argues that while ‘the work of the electrician and the mechanical engineer [in the conctruction of a power station] is undoubtedly the most important,’ the architect must build ‘the frame [to] uphold, support, and protect the vital organs [...] [and] give some suitable outward expression of the wonderful and useful work carried out within the structure’. Relations with the surrounding community are critical to the success of these structures:

In designing these buildings the amenities of the locality should not be disregarded, and every care should be taken to reduce to the minimum all causes of nuisance or annoyance. The appearance of the building counts for much in these cases.

A small amount of additional capital expenditure can mitigate the risk of ‘hostility, expense and litigation’ leading to ‘good feeling among the neighbours, a more valuable building for the owners [...] something to show that the people of this generation, while inheriting the commercial instinct of those who founded the Hanseatic League, have not lost the art of combining the useful with the aesthetic in the design of buildings of the warehouse class’.

The paper established Peach as an international authority and he became a consultant to France and Switzerland on their power station building programmes.

As well as building power infrastructure buildings, Peach worked on apartment blocks (including Crompton Court on Pelham Street), theatres (including the interior of The Theatre Royal, Haymarket) and the Lawn Tennis Stadium at Wimbledon, the largest reinforced concrete structure of its day when opened in 1921.

A most modern architect, therefore, but also a man who, after a day of designing power stations, would go on to work through the night on vast drawings of King Solomon’s Temple at Jerusalem (where he had spent a year trying to solve its mysteries), such as that now in the collection of Robert Simon Fine Art in New York (another version also in the RIBA Collection), or on imaginary pictures of Christ superimposed on the plan of a Church, now in the Drawing Matter collection (fig. 10).

10. Peach’s Plan of a church constructed on divine principles, 1910 (Courtesy Drawing Matter)

Roman holiday

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan has, in this publication [14], convincingly shown how the original design for Grosvenor Square, with its novel baroque ‘Garden Oval’ form and its centrally-placed gilded equestrian statue of George I, echoes the Campidoglio in Rome as reworked by Michelangelo: elliptical with the antique sculpture of Marcus Aurelius in its centre. The Capitoline Hill was well documented in the eighteenth century and visited by numerous grand tourists including most likely Sir Richard Grosvenor, who spent seven weeks in Rome in 1705-6. As Longstaffe-Gowan explains, the Capitol represented the best of both worlds – antiquity recast and modernised by Michelangelo.

How appropriate therefore that Peach should continue the Roman metaphor by housing the new structure in Roman trappings, ancient and modern (fig. 11). At street level, the Diocletian windows are derived from the Thermae in Rome (now Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri), while, above, the Baroque open pediments of the two gazebos (fig. 12) evoke those of Ferdinando Fuga’s facade of Santa Maria Maggiore (figs. 13 & 14), built in 1743 when Grosvenor Square was at its most fashionable.

11. Peach’s plan for the substation and Italian Gardens for the Westminster Electric Supply Corporation, c. 1903 (Courtesy Drawing Matter)

12. From Santa Maria Maggiore to Mayfair: the open pediment in Brown Hart Gardens, 2021 (Courtesy © Laura Hodgson)

13. Giuseppi Vasi, View of Ferdinando Fuga’s facade of Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome, 1742 (Private Collection)

Italianate architecture was, of course, much used in mid to late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain both for formal gardens, for example in nearby Kensington Gardens, and in an industrial context. The brick campanili of the Western Pumping Station at the mouth of the Grosvenor Canal on the edge of Pimlico or of the Kew Bridge Pumping Station conceal sophisticated water infrastructure. But here in fashionable Mayfair, Peach produces an altogether dressier affair, less Renaissance and more Baroque, of Portland Stone rather than of brick (fig. 15).

14. Detail of the open pediment on the facade of Santa Maria Maggiore (Courtesy AGF Srl / Alamy Stock Photo)

15. Italianate detailing from Peach’s plans, c. 1903 (Courtesy Drawing Matter)

Corbs in Baroque clothing

Brown Hart Gardens is deceptively old fashioned. Not only does it house a thoroughly modern piece of infrastructure, it is one of the earliest examples of a plaza for public amenity raised above a basement with a utilitarian function. It was only a decade later, in 1915, that Le Corbusier advocated elevated cities, supported by pilotis, the ground level raised by 4 or 5 metres, beneath which would lie all the main utilities including electricity and water. [15]

There are numerous later examples of such raised plazas in London: Peter and Alison Smithson’s Economist Buildings in St James’s Street with its car parking beneath (1962-4), Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury (1967-72; loading bays and parking beneath) (fig. 16) or the raised gardens of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon’s Barbican Centre (1971-82). And, in post war Britain, Georgian squares such as Cavendish Square were retrofitted with underground car parks.

16. Birkin Haward, axonometric view of Patrick Hodgkinson’s Brunswick Centre, c. 1968, showing the raised plaza and the levels below (Courtesy Drawing Matter)

17. Brown Hart Gardens in decline, c. 1979 (Photograph Courtesy David Trace. Westminster City Archives)

Post-war poetic imagination and decline, and twenty-first century renaissance

The second half of the twentieth century was not kind to the gardens. While clearly capturing the imagination of architects and students, Brown Hart Gardens was left untouched and went into decline (fig. 17).

The garden was the subject of studies by Architectural Association students under Dalibor Vesely and Mohsen Mostafavi in 1978-81, in which students sought to make a ‘new attempt to restore the dialogue between the garden and town (culture) and explore the possibilities of its reurbanisation’. In these beguiling and deeply poetic schemes, five students [16] expanded the square into the vaults below creating multi-layered and compartmentalised sunken gardens with fountains and cascades, cloisters and libraries, all in contrast to the surrounding area. [17]

Drawings in the Grosvenor archives also show possible plans to redevelop what are now the Peabody flats into a large office block and shopping mall fronting Oxford Street, with bridges and subterranean access to Brown Hart Gardens, refurbished as a ‘Market/Bazaar’ (from old Rome to New Rome?).

By the early 1980s, the garden was closed by the then tenant of the substation ostensibly due to a mixture of maintenance issues as well as owing to concerns about anti-social behaviour.

The garden remained closed for over twenty years (though still, it is said, used for nefarious purposes) until, in 2007, Grosvenor assumed management responsibility from its tenant, EDF, undertook some repair work and reopened the garden on a limited basis.

When Brown Hart Gardens reopened in 2010, it was a rather forlorn place: cheap concrete paving from the 1970s; a handful of potted plants; and a switched off fountain. The comprehensive refurbishment and renewal of 2013 sought to reinvigorate the garden on a basis that would be self-sustaining and to make it a place which the local residential and working population would want to use both on an everyday basis and for events.

BDP won the competition for the £4.8 million refurbishment and delivered a scheme comprised of a contemporary pavilion housing a café, a modular system of custom-built seating and planting tubs (fig. 18), a new fountain and additional pedestrian access via a staircase and a lift. The café would provide income for the upkeep of the garden and sufficient footfall to discourage bad behaviour, while the modular furniture and tubs would provide for a versatile space. [18]

18. Brown Hart Gardens revived, 2021 (Courtesy © Laura Hodgson)

The scheme evolved over an extensive consultation process with local residents during which BDP invited people to sketch what they wanted to see (or to tell a draughtsman to draw their ideas). Inevitably, there was some apprehension among residents about the commercialisation of the garden as well as the implications of the increased footfall on residents’ privacy and amenity, and these issues were addressed in the designs as well as the planning conditions.

The design of the refurbishment is also reflective of the structural exigencies of the roof, which had limited capacity to bear heavy loads: the trees and the pavilion were aligned with the columns and beams below and the planters and furniture are lightweight in construction.

Visually, the scheme has been successful, refreshing the garden without detracting from its sense of quirky mystery. The pedestrian, looking up from the street, catches alluring glimpses of the trees above, this ‘worm’s eye view’ [19] also making the trees look taller than they are. Coming up one of the three staircases, one is drawn into a pleasing grid of paved walkways with a range of places to sit, ranging from wooden seats alongside the planters to rather extravagant chaises longues and an old stone bench now incorporating a fountain. The pavilion housing the café is light and airy and sits well in front of the Roman gazebo, its butterfly roof playing with the pediment behind and providing visual support to the original dome (fig. 19).

19. The butterfly roof of the 2013 pavilion café in dialogue with the pediment behind, 2021 (Courtesy © Laura Hodgson)

The most striking change is that, for the first time in its history, this is a garden with an abundance of plants.

When recently I visited the garden at lunchtime, it was good to see how the day beds were providing a comfortable place for Crossrail construction workers to take a lunchtime nap, adopting almost classical poses no doubt in deference to their Roman surroundings (fig. 20). Nick Edwards, the architect from BDP responsible for the scheme, explained the designs of the day beds to me:

On the one hand we didn’t want backs as we wanted to give the impression of outward looking, but we also wanted to discourage people from getting too comfortable when orientated towards residential windows – hence the small ridge to their rear.

The garden is also used for temporary art installations as well as local events such as the live screening of The All England Lawn Tennis Championships in July 2021 to an audience happily ensconced in deckchairs, establishing a virtual link between two of Peach’s most famous works (fig. 21).

20. Dolce far niente: Crossrail workers in repose, 2021 (Courtesy © Andrew Jones)

21. Wimbledon 2021: Peach’s other masterpiece, Wimbledon Centre Court, teleported into Brown Hart Gardens (Courtesy Grosvenor)

The refurbishment of Brown Hart Gardens, while aesthetically successful, has not brought the footfall which its owners had hoped for. For users in search of a peaceful spot away from the relentless churn of Oxford Street that may not be a bad thing. Brown Hart Gardens feels very much a part of Mayfair now.

The greatest new challenge to this end of Mayfair will be Crossrail, with many of its expected 137,000 daily passengers likely to use the new Bond Street station, just a couple of blocks away on Davies Street. Brown Hart Gardens’ position on one of the station’s westward pedestrian routes will likely lead to more people discovering it, a peaceful place to take a sandwich before catching the train to London Airport or a striking first impression of London after an overnight flight from Beijing.

Brown Hart Gardens may also one day be affected by technological change, which could make its use as an electricity substation redundant and open up new possibilities for the use of the space below. This would be the first real test of Peach’s philosophy that his buildings should be designed in such a way as to last long after their original purpose had been fulfilled. I can think of no better purpose for that deep subterranean space lit by those wonderful Diocletian windows than a Roman bath.

Footnotes
1. S. Bradley and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. London 6: Westminster, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p.524.
2. Bradley and Pevsner, op.cit., p.524.
3. Bradley and Pevsner, op.cit., p.524.
4. F.H.W. Sheppard, Survey of London: Volume 40, The Grosvenor Estate in Mayfair, Part 2 (The Buildings), Chapter 6 (London: London County Council, 1960). Available at british-history.ac.uk [accessed 18 July 2021].
5. Survey of London, op.cit..
6. Notebook of Charles Booth’s survey of London, c.1899, Vol. 358. Available on booth.lse.ac.uk [accessed 18 July 2021].
7. The Duke had, reputedly, also wanted a cocoa house but this did not materialise due to a lack of a suitable operator. His dream was to come true in 2013 with the opening of the pavilion café.
8. In 1884 the 1st Duke of Westminster had opened Ebury Square Gardens to the public, the first time a garden square had been made accessible in this way. It was not until 1946 that Grosvenor Square was opened to the public, this time by the 2nd Duke.
9. Survey of London, op.cit..
10. Notebook of Charles Booth’s survey of London, op.cit..
11. J.N. Hill, Pioneer in Power. [source unknown; after 1934].
12. E. Stanley Hall, ‘Obituary of Charles Stanley Peach’, Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, vol 61, 8 September 1934.
13. Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 2 April 1904. Volume 11, Issue 11. Available at archive.org [accessed 22 May 2021]
14. The London Gardener, Volume the twenty-first (2017), pp.42-63.
15. Le Corbusier, Vers une Architecture, (Paris: Flammarion, 1923/1995).
16. Kaveh Mehrabani, Hugh Locke, Athanasios Spanomaridis, Norman Chang and Kalliope Kontozoglou, published in Anonymous (1982). Architecture and Continuity; 1 Themes. Kentish Town Projects 1978-81, Diploma Unit 1. London: Architectural Association.
17. Kaveh Mehrabani described his proposal as opposing ‘the monothematic consumerism of Oxford Street with the natural polyphony of a garden’.
18. The original brief provided for 12 such events a year. 19. Conversation with Nick Edwards, 30 March 2021.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Niall Hobhouse and Kendra Matchett of Drawing Matter, Timothy Jones (formerly Director, Planning and Heritage, Grosvenor Britain and Ireland), Emma Roberts (Archivist & Records Manager, Grosvenor Britain and Ireland) and Louise Benson (Archivist, Grosvenor Estate), Nick Edwards (Principal, BDP), Lisa Moss (Archivist, City of Westminster Archives Centre), Robert Simon (Robert Simon Fine Art), Laura Hodgson, Dean Smith and Sally Williams