The fourth element on the Restoration Project information board is ‘re-building the Victorian conservatory’. (Large heated greenhouses – conservatories -, like bandstands, were to become a standard feature of most, but not all, late Victorian municipal parks. These represented a great investment by the park’s authorities not only in their building costs but also in their running costs in terms of coal fuel for the boilers and labour. Since the futuristic construction methods pioneered by Joseph Paxton’s Chrystal Palace in the 1850s it had been possible to build conservatories of single-glazing onto a wrought iron framework although a wood framework might still then have been used to reduce capital outlay. From the relevant committee minutes such details are not always clear except when repairs were needed.
The raison d’etre for municipal park conservatories was education, by being able to see hothouse plants growing the common man would get an insight into global variations of climate and geography and thereby be enlightened. Visitors would follow a defined path through the conservatory and visitor numbers of hundreds over a weekend were often recorded. The photo above shows the steel skeleton of the Project’s new conservatory in Pearson Park erected early in November 2019).
The next element listed on the Project’s information board is ‘Improvement works to the bowling pavilion’. (By the early 20th century crown-green bowls was becoming a very popular sport and bowling greens were increasingly added to municipal parks to accommodate this sport. Pressure then arose for ‘bowl houses’ to be built to provide shelter and storage for the competitors – the term ‘bowl houses’ being misleading when first encountered. The Project’s bowling pavilion when restored is intended to be multi-functional).
The next element listed on the Project’s information board is ‘Improvement works to the ice-cream kiosk’. (Again the forerunners of such buildings today evolved in the early days of municipal parks rather than necessarily being there from day-one.
(to be continued)