Victoria Square

Victoria Square stands on what was originally a field called Ferney’s Close. It was crossed by a diagonal path and pedestrians still follow that established right of way.

The four sides of the Square were built between 1837 and 1874 and show four distinct architectural styles. The earliest side was Lansdown Place that was designed in the Regency style by Foster and Wood. On Number 13 is a plaque to Dr William Budd, one of the many doctors who have lived in the Square. An epidemiologist, he discovered that cholera was spread by contaminated water.

Next to be constructed was the Royal Promenade terrace. The speculative builder responsible for the development was William Bateman Reed, and he included the royal coat of arms above numbers 7 and 8. Reed built Albert Lodge, next to the Arch House, for his own use.

By the time of the 1851 Census all the houses on Royal Promenade had been sold. From 1865 to 1871, poet, critic, and historian, J. Addington Symonds occupied Number 7 , and later, Marjorie Watson-Williams (1892-1954), who became well known as an artist under the name ‘Paule Vezelay’, lived in Number 2. During the Second World War, Number 4 was destroyed by a bomb, and Numbers 3 and 5 were badly damaged.

W. G. Grace lived at Number 15 on the South-West side during 1895, and in May of that year, scored 1,000 first class runs! The very much longer residence of pioneering architect Eveline Dew Blacker, who lived in the Square from 1901 to 1956, is memorialized on Number 20.

By the time the fourth side of the square was being planned, terraces were out of fashion, and ‘villas’ or semi-detached houses were built instead. The largest of these was originally the vicarage for St Andrew’s and is now The Victoria Square Hotel.

A tunnel under the path allowed those with access to the Gardens to move between the two sides of the Square and provided storage space for gardening equipment. It has long since been blocked off, but the lintels await the curious.

The Square Gardens were for the use of local residents. Railings enclosed them and members of the public were restricted to the paved path. Incidentally, this path – not the one through St Andrew’s Churchyard – is the original ‘Birdcage Walk’, so called because the owners of caged-birds ‘aired’ their imprisoned pets beside the railings. All the railings were removed during WW II.

A Bhutan Pine and a Cedar of Lebanon are among the majestic trees that remain in the Square Gardens from the original planting.