Homes with similar styles were overlooked by developers
HILLFIELD House in Gloucester and Cornerways in Cheltenham bear more than a passing resemblance. They also shared the good fortune to be overlooked by planners and developers in the 1960s.
Hillfield House in London Road is a scaled down version of Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s residence on the Isle of Wight. Both these buildings date from the middle of the 19th century, both are Italianate in design with wide eaved roofs and the central feature of each is a stylised campanile, or bell tower.
A Gloucester businessman named Albert Estcourt, who served on the city council and gave his name to Estcourt Road and Estcourt Close, built the house.
It was commissioned by Charles Walker, a Gloucester timber merchant and to make way for it an earlier property named Woodbine House was flattened.
Incidentally, there is a connection between Osborne House and Gloucestershire.
Its architect was Thomas Cubitt whose son was the great grandfather of sometime resident of this county Queen Camilla.
The architect who designed Hillfield House was John Giles, who was also
responsible for Coney Hill hospital. Mr Giles went on to design asylums (as such institutions were then titled) up and down the country, almost cornering the market in this architectural niche.
During the First World War Hillfield House was turned into an emergency hospital for wounded soldiers. Then in the 1930s it was acquired by Gloucester City Council and served a period as HQ for the diocese and local government offices. Ten years ago it was sold for use as a private residence.
It stands in Hillfield Gardens where four of the city’s oldest trees, three redwoods and an oak can be found.
Cornerways in The Park, Cheltenham has also been sold recently to become a private home. But its original function was as the entrance to a zoo. The architect may well have been Samuel Dawkes (or Daukes as it sometimes appears), who lived in Cheltenham.
He was responsible for a number of prominent buildings in the town including Lansdown railway station and St Peter’s church. The house that Dawkes built to his own design and lived in was called Tudor Lodge and stood 100 yards from Cornerways until demolished in 1966.
The idea for the zoo came from a solicitor named Thomas Billings who in 1831 bought land that is today the Park Campus of Gloucestershire University. His plan was a venture officially titled, the Gloucestershire Zoological, Botanical and Horticultural Gardens.
A grand plan it was too with a Grand Promenade punctuated by statues and fountains, about which were arranged various aviaries, aquariums, dens for carnivorous animals, monkey houses, a reconstruction of the North Pole complete with icebergs and polar bears, a bear pit, llamas, zebras and kangaroos, plus houses and paddocks for elephants and rhinos.
There was also to be a “Geographical and botanical garden for the arrangement and culture of plants in the respective countries to which they are indigenous”.
An issue of 4,000 shares at £5 was offered to the market to bolster finances and Queen Victoria’s Coronation Day, June 28, 1838, was chosen for the new zoo’s opening.
But there were problems. For one thing the project was underfunded, but more importantly Cheltenham already had a well established zoological and botanical garden. In 1821 Charles Hale Jessop opened such a venture on a 20 acre site near the town centre that remained in business until 1870. Now the spot is Waitrose and its immediate environs.
Cheltenham simply didn’t need two zoos and Billing’s enterprise failed. All that remains is Cornerways, which is known to a decreasing number of older residents as the Elephant House.