Park of the Month

Morrab House, a mid C19 villa, was built by a wealthy brewer, Samuel Pidwell, on open ground running down to the seashore to the west of Penzance in 1841 (Pett 1998). This open ground between Penzance and Ludgvan was known as the Morrep, from which the name of Pidwell’s villa derived. Morrab House was acquired by Charles Campbell Ross, partner in a private bank, MP for St Ives, and four times mayor of Penzance, who used it as his residence until the early 1880s when he moved to Carne. In 1888-9 the property, comprising the villa and a large walled garden, was purchased by Penzance Corporation for development as a public park, with the villa providing accommodation for Penzance Library. By the late C19 Penzance was developing as a popular seaside resort and the provision of a park was seen as a necessary facility for the recreation of visitors, particularly when the weather rendered the promenades unusable. This beneficial aspect of the park was noted in 1889: ‘When the sea is lashing over the celebrated promenade, these sheltered gardens will form a pleasant retreat’ (Gardeners’ Chronicle).

The Corporation held a competition for the design of the new park, with a premium of £21 (Pring 1996); this was won in 1889 by a London designer, Reginald Upcher, who the same year submitted a paper to the Falmouth Naturalist Society on exotic planting (Royal Polytechnic Soc Ann Rep 1889). Upcher’s plan for the park included a bandstand, tennis grounds, children’s playground, and gymnasium, and an area described as a sub-tropical garden. The sloping site was to be divided into areas for different activities by a series of curvilinear walks, while mature trees from the gardens of Morrab House were incorporated into the scheme. At the opening of the park in 1889 the Gardeners’ Chronicle noted that ‘One of its features is to be a Palm-grove, where tourists may fancy themselves in the tropics or on the Mediterranean shores’, while a significant role for the park in the study of acclimatisation was anticipated.

Upcher’s design was varied in its execution, and the 1909 OS map indicates that between 1889 and 1909 significant developments were made: the bandstand took the place of the children’s playground, while a fountain was constructed on the upper tennis ground below a conservatory. Early C20 photographs and descriptions of the park (Morrab Library/CLSL) suggest that the extent of the exotic, ‘sub-tropical’ planting was significantly increased from Upcher’s original scheme. As early as 1895 The Garden noted the use of bamboos, cordylines, and agaves, while in 1930 cordylines, tree ferns, olives, and Musa ensente in fruit were noted (Thurston 1930). This tradition of planting continued until the late C20, while the late C19 conservatory and greenhouse was replaced on the original footprint by a single-storey old people’s day centre c 1970. Today (2000), Morrab Gardens remains in municipal ownership.