Listing Text

GLOUCESTER ROAD,

Lower Swainswick

1-2 Alice Park

11/01/07 II

Pair of park keepers' houses. 1937-40 by Geoffrey Jellicoe.
MATERIALS: Ashlar fronts, tiled roof.
PLAN: Rectangular, with entrances at either end.
EXTERIOR: Two storeys, five-bay symmetrical front facing onto Alice Park. Gabled roof with kneelers and a deep eaves cornice. Entrances to each house via moulded doorcases in either gabled end, beneath casement window; that to the west side (No. 1) has a Moderne style stone relief of a bouquet of flowers and is dated 1937. Plat band at first floor level. Main front has four windows per floor, those to ground floor with narrow shutters; the plat band rises up between each window to enclose further Moderne stone relief's. These comprise (from left) a fish (`Neither fish'), a dressed ham (`Flesh'), a turkey (`Fowl') and a kipper (`Nor Good Red Herring').
INTERIOR: Not inspected.
HISTORY: A very distinctive park building of its day. Jellicoe, designer of Alice Park and one of the principal figures of C20 landscape architecture, was employed to design this new park, endowed by Mr M.H. MacVicar as a memorial to his wife (d.1937). It opened in 1940. The building fuses the Cotswold vernacular, the Queen Anne style and 1930s modernism. The reliefs and their cryptic message (inspired, perhaps, by the strange carved reliefs on the façade of nearby Grosvenor Place) were said by Jellicoe to allude to `the categories of people permitted to use the public facilities of Alice Park'. Ruth Guilding has described the building as `mannerly, reticent... enigmatic... still serving its original purpose, manages to convey a mixture of signals - part rustic cottage, part authoritarian public architecture - a progression from the embattled, castellated style of many lodges at the gates of nineteenth century municipal parks'.
SOURCES: [R. Gilding, `Historic Public Parks Avon' (1998), 53-59].

Listing NGR: ST7636766634