People : Thomas Mawson, Garden Designer, Town Planner and Exceptional Landscape Architect.

Thomas Hayton Mawson (5 May 1861 – 14 November 1933), known as T. H. Mawson, was a British garden designer, landscape architect, and town planner.

Personal life

Mawson was born in Nether Wyresdale, Lancashire and left school at age 12. His father, who died in 1877, was a warper in a cotton mill and later started a building business. He married Anna Prentice in 1884 and the Mawsons made their family home in Windermere, Westmorland in 1885. They had four sons and five daughters. His eldest son, Edward Prentice Mawson was a successful landscape architect and took over the running of his father’s firm when his father developed Parkinson’s disease in 1923. Another son, John Mawson, moved to New Zealand in 1928 as Director of Town Planning for that country. He died at Applegarth, Hest Bank, near Lancaster, Lancashire, aged 72 and is buried in Bowness Cemetery within a few miles of some of his best gardens and overlooking Windermere.

Working life

To make a living, he worked first in the building trade in Lancaster, then at a London nursery where he gained experience in landscape gardening. In the 1880s he moved back north, where he and two brothers started the Lakeland Nursery in Windermere. The firm became sufficiently successful for him to be able to turn his attention to garden design.

Mawson’s first commission was a local property, Graythwaite Hall, and his work there showed his hallmark blend of architecture and planting. He went on to design other gardens in Cumbria such as Langdale Chase, Holehird, Brockhole, and Holker Hall around the turn of the century.

In 1891 Mawson was commissioned to design and construct Belle Vue Park in Newport, Monmouthshire, Mawson’s first win in an open competition. His design was, in fact, designed for the neighbouring field, the site of the then Newport and Monmouthshire Hospital after Mawson misunderstood directions on his first visit. The mistake was not realised until the first site visit, after the contract had been awarded. Between 1894 and 1909 Mawson was commissioned to design and construct Dyffryn Gardens near Cardiff. The Rushton Hall estate in Northamptonshire has early 20th century formal terraced gardens designed by Mawson between 1905–1909 and implemented by his brother Robert.

Later Mawson designed gardens in various parts of Britain, and others in Europe and Canada. In London he designed gardens at The Hill, in Hampstead for Lord Leverhulme. The impressive 800 ft long pergola is now open to the public as part of the West Heath. He designed Rivington Gardens and Lever Park in Lancashire also for Lord Leverhulme. Padiham Memorial Park (1921) was another commission in Lancashire. Mawson also designed the gardens at Wood Hall near Cockermouth, Cumbria, which were completed in 1920. Much of this garden still survives today.

From 1910 to 1924 he lectured frequently at the school of civic design, Liverpool University. He also contributed articles on garden design to The Studio magazine and its annual The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art. In the 1920s he designed gardens for Dunira, a country house in Perthshire.

In 1923 he became president of the Town Planning Institute, and in 1929 the first president of the Institute of Landscape Architects.

International work

In 1908 he won a competition to lay out the Peace Palace gardens at The Hague. He also advised on the development of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the United States. In 1912 Mawson toured several Canadian cities, beginning in Halifax and ending up in Victoria, British Columbia. As well as giving talks, he proposed several (unaccepted) designs including for Wascana Centre in Regina, Brockton Point lighthouse, Coal Harbour and Lost Lagoon in Vancouver, and urban design plans for Banff and downtown Calgary. Mawson’s vision for Calgary, had it been implemented, would have changed what was then a dusty prairie town, into a city of the City Beautiful movement.

Legacy

With the passage of time some of the original features have deteriorated. A number of Mawson’s parks were restored in the early twenty-first century. For example, the two municipal parks at Stoke-on-Trent (Hanley Park and Burslem Park) and a rose garden at Bushey were restored as part of the “Parks for People” programme for historic parks and cemeteries in the UK.

Archive

More than 14,000 plans and drawings together with 6,500 glass plate negatives and photographs comprise the archive of Mawson documents. They are stored at Kendal Record Office having been offered to the Cumbria Archive Service following the closure of Thomas H. Mawson & Son of Lancaster and Windermere in 1978. As at 2010, the material has not been fully catalogued and conservation is proving difficult.

Selected writings

• 1900: The Art and Craft of Garden Making, 1st edn 1900, 5th edn (recommended), 1926.
• 1908: “The Designing of Gardens”, article in The Studio Year Book of Decorative Art 1908
• 1911: Civic Art Covers the principles of town planning
• 1927: The Life and Work of an English Landscape Architect

 

Hidden London : Hampstead, The Soap King’s Secret Hill Garden & The Largest Pergola in England

Now part of Hampstead Heath , this site was formerly part of the gardens of Hill House. The original house was built in 1807 and in the C19th was owned by the Quaker banking family of Hoare until 1896 when Sir Samuel Hoare sold the property to George Fisher, partner in a successful firm of auctioneers. Fisher rebuilt the house and moved here with his family. Set in 5 acres of parkland and gardens, there were apparently ponies for the children and a goat-chaise. A blue plaque was erected to Fisher’s son Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, statistician and geneticist, who lived here as a child until 1904. The house and its gardens were then successively modified by the philanthropist and soap manufacturer William Hesketh Lever. Lever, who was created Baron in 1917 and in 1922 became Viscount Leverhulme, owned the property from 1904 until his death in 1925. He renamed the house The Hill and the additions he made to it included north and south wings to the garden front in c.1905 designed by architects Grayson and Ould, who also designed a terrace along the garden front to which Thomas Mawson (1861-1933) added an Ionic Verandah in c.1910. Other additions to the house included a library wing (1913/14), a ballroom beneath the terrace (1923) and extension of the south wing (1924/5), the latter by Mawson with T H Mawson & Sons.

The gardens were laid out for Lever in 3 phases, the first scheme following his purchase of Hill House in 1904, a second scheme following purchase of Heath Lodge to the north-west in 1911, and a third after he purchased another property, Cedar Lawn to the south, in 1914. During WWI Cedar Lawn was used as a hospital and subsequently as a maternity hospital. The first two garden schemes were designed by Thomas Mawson who had previously worked for Lever in Lancashire. The early C19th gardens of Hill House had been laid out on sloping ground to the west of the house and consisted of a large lawn with scattered trees, boundary shrubs and walks, with a double shrubbery on the west side and probably kitchen gardens between; one walk led onto Hampstead Heath. Mawson levelled the site into terraces, with terrace gardens in front of the house, a level lawn and a Pergola created around the west and south sides of the garden in 1906. Between the Pergola and south-west boundary were kitchen gardens. After purchasing Heath Lodge in 1911 Lever demolished the house in order to extend his gardens. The Pergola was continued across a bridge over the public road that separated the two properties and led to a circular Garden Temple; a further stretch of the Pergola led to a Belvedere at the western end, which overlooked Hampstead Heath and the former gardens of Heath Lodge. A Pergola Temple replaced a conservatory on the west of the original Pergola; service buildings were erected to the east of the new land and the 2-acre garden was incorporated into Lever’s gardens. In 1922 Lever demolished Cedar Lawn and again extended the Pergola and gardens.

After Lord Leverhulme’s death in 1925 The Hill property was acquired in 1926 by shipowner Andrew Weir, first Baron Inverforth, who left it on his death in 1955 to Manor House Hospital, when it was renamed Inverforth House in his memory. The property was divided in 1960 when the LCC purchased the western part of the site and the north-western part of the Pergola, which with the gardens were restored and opened to the public in 1963, renamed The Hill Garden. The southern part of the Pergola was publicly access in 1971 but later closed as unsafe. In 1991 the Hospital offered their part of the Pergola to the Corporation of London, who had taken over ownership of the north-western part of The Hill Garden in 1989 after the abolition of the GLC in 1986. In 1995 the Corporation restored the Pergola and laid out further formal gardens to the west on the site of the former kitchen gardens and glasshouses. These have a formal arrangement of trees, large planted pots, and a geometric arrangement of beds planted with herbaceous plants and shrubs, herbs and ornamental vegetable. Inverforth House and its gardens (q.v.) was sold to developers in the 1990s for private residences. There are excellent views towards the house and over Hampstead Heath.