ONE of Darlington’s most intriguing, and most concealed, town centre curios is opening its gardens to the public next weekend for the first time.
Tucked away down a blue-grey scoria-bricked back lane is a 200-year-old black and white mock-Tudor fancy house with a garden of pink and blue hydrangeas wrapping around it. They grow out of what was once Joseph Pease’s pond and are surrounded by the mature trees which once formed the boundary of his opulent Southend estate.
“We’ve been asked a number of times about opening the garden and we were going to do it in 2020 but then Covid hit,” says Frances Herschel who owns it with her husband Tony Inglis. “We want to share it with people because it is unique, and it is unique because of the house and the trees and the history.”
Joseph Pease bought the small mansion in 1826 – the year after he had played a prominent role with his father Edward in opening the Stockton & Darlington Railway – when he was 27-years-old and newly married.
The mansion had been built by its previous owner, Edward Backhouse, who had decamped to Sunderland to make a massive fortune running the only bank in the town. The mansion was then called Borrowses, probably because it was the last house in the borough.
Joseph changed its name to Southend – because it was on the south end of town – and enlarged it (he and his wife Emma had 12 children). He also lavishly improved its grounds, lining the paths with purple and white fluorspar from his mines of Weardale so that they sparkled like amethysts in the sun.
In the hothouses grew pineapples, nectarines, peaches, grapes, figs and melons, and dotted around the 27 acre estate were eye-catching features like a summer house, a temple, a fountain, a couple of ponds and the mock-Tudor fancy house.
It is built of Pease buff bricks – made of saggar clay from the coalmines, as last week’s Memories told – and, as Tony points out, the black woodwork is actually pre-cast concrete.
So not only is it mock-Tudor but it is mock-half-timbered as well.
Because it was next to one of the ponds, this curio has been interpreted as a boathouse, which it may be.
But its main entrance, and most picturesque side, is at 90 degrees to the pond. It seems to face onto the route of a lost, looping carriageway which allowed Joseph to drive right round his estate – perhaps impressing his guests with the surprise black-and-white house, with an Alpine feel, that was romantically hidden among his boundary woods with the pond for added interest.
Perhaps visitors next Sunday will come up with their own theories…
By 1845, Joseph had sold the property because in that year it was put up for sale along with the fabulously foreboding terrace of Harewood Grove, which had been built just beyond Joseph’s boundary in 1835.
The sale particulars describe it as an "ornamental paddock house".
Joseph Pease died in 1872 and his unmarried daughters, Emma and Jane, took over Southend, with developers constantly eyeing up the lucrative town centre estate.
Emma outlived Jane and died in 1895, and then the Southend Estate Company. It had architect GG Hoskins (who also featured here last week) lay out Southend Avenue, Oakdene Avenue and Beechwood Avenue across Joseph’s pleasure grounds. This meant filling in both of Joseph’s ponds.
Among the company's assets was the ornamental paddock house which it sold to West Hartlepool shipbuilder William Creswell Gray for £1,100. Mr Gray's plot included land on which 13 houses in Oakdene Avenue were built, which left the fancy house – today called Oakdene Lodge – hidden away down the back lane.
For much of the 20th Century, it was quietly forgotten about. There’s a lovely story about windowcleaner John Burton, who lived there from 1949 to 1978. He was well known, and often spotted, in town cycling to jobs with his long ladder tied horizontally to his pushbike.
In 1979, it was bought by Peter and Ann Kelly, who fought long and hard to get services connected to it so they could bring the surviving shell of the property into the 20th Century. They then spent more than a decade sympathetically restoring it to its eye-catching glory.
Frances and Tony have continued that process since purchasing it in 2006, doubling the size of its garden by acquiring a “four metre deep blackberry jungle” which had taken root on a neighbouring section of the filled-in pond.
Here they built a mock-Tudor, mock-timbered garage which sits beautifully in its surroundings. They sunk a 6,500 litre rainwater tank the size of a small car, and turned themselves into gardeners.
“I had mown a lawn before we moved here, but that was it,” says Tony. “The transition has been quite fantastic. We are not horticulturalists, we are not plant experts, this is all about creating a nice, positive environment to live in.”
He then launches into a deeply scientific explanation of his techniques to use aluminium sulphate to slightly acidify the soil to encourage his hydrangeas to manufacture an anthocyanin pigment which turns the blooms blue.
Oakdene Lodge, off Oakdene Avenue, is open on Sunday, July 19, along with a neighbouring property on Southend Avenue where an Edwardian terrace back yard has been turned into a multi-tiered lush green garden with a water feature and sculptures.
To up the sculpture count further, Darlington floral artist Nikki Wright is creating a two-metre high piece celebrating English flowers to go in the grounds of Oakdene Lodge. It will incorporate some of the features and ideas which have just earned her a silver medal at the Chelsea Flower Show.
“We get lots of gardening clubs who come and visit us so we thought we would open it for the National Garden Scheme at least once,” says Tony.
“Yes, I think it is probably a one-off,” says Frances.
L Oakdene Lodge and 37 Southend Avenue, Darlington, are open on Sunday, July 19, from 1pm to 5pm. Adults are £7, children free. Tea, coffee and cake will be served by members of the Inner Wheel.
ALTHOUGH streets have spread across Joseph Pease’s Southend estate, there is still much left from his time:
- The mansion, which became a Catholic secondary school, is now Duncan Bannatyne’s New Grange Hotel
- The mature trees that provide the backdrop to the garden of Oakdene Lodge are in Green Park. It was part of Joseph’s estate which was saved from development by the Waldy family who presented it to the town in 1955
- The fountain started providing water for animals in Tubwell Row in 1858 but made such a mess of the mud street that Joseph moved it to South Park in 1862. However, low water pressure there apparently made it useless so he moved it to be a feature in the woods which became Green Park. However, when the park opened in 1960, it was vandalised and lost its top tiers of cherubs and dolphins, so The Northern Echo paid for it to be restored and moved to Houndgate, behind the Dolphin Centre, in 1970 to commemorate the paper’s 100th anniversary. It is there today
- Part of the tree-lined carriage drive that looped around the Southend estate is now the well-photographed Crocus Walk beside Grange Road
- Beechwood Avenue and St Augustine’s primary school are on top of Joseph’s other fishpond
- Last time we looked, Joseph’s south-facing summerhouse was being used by some residents of Southend Avenue to keep their wheelybins in.
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