The Roper’s Garden (or Cheyne Walk Garden) site is at the heart of the old village of Chelsea immediately west of the old parish Church of All Saints. It formed part of the orchard of Sir Thomas More, which he gave to his daughter Margaret on her marriage to William Roper in 1521. In the C19 the area became heavily built up, becoming one of London’s most densely populated boroughs. Chelsea Embankment, which runs along the southern side of the site, was laid out in the early 1870s, opening in 1874. Between 1909 and 1914 Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) had a studio on the site, as commemorated by his sculpture on the east side of the garden (installed June 1972).
During the Second World War the area suffered severe bomb damage. Early in the morning of 17 April 1941, a parachute mine destroyed all the buildings on the site and most of the Church of All Saints opposite, as is commemorated by a recent plaque in the garden to Yvonne Green, a local auxiliary firefighter. Local residents led by the Chelsea Society argued to keep the land as open space following the war, and planted it themselves. In 1960, Peter Shepheard produced a professional design for the gardens, exploiting the basements of the previous buildings to create a sunken garden with walls to keep out some of the traffic noise. The garden was opened on 11 March 1964 by Lady Heath, mayor of Chelsea and remains little altered.
BIOGRAPHY
Peter Shepheard (1913-2002) believed in the unity of the professions of architecture, landscape architecture and town planning, which found expression in his work as a practitioner and teacher over the course of a successful and prolific career. He was born in Oxton on the Wirral where his father was an architect; though his practice was very modest, Tom Shepheard was well connected, and Peter’s godfather was Patrick Abercrombie, Britain’s leading planner from the 1920s into the 1950s. Shepheard junior studied architecture and town planning at Liverpool and came to prominence as one of Abercrombie’s assistants on the Greater London Plan, producing the first perspectives for a new town proposed at Ongar. He worked for the Ministry of Town and Country Planning and Stevenage Development Corporation on the early plans for Britain’s first new town before forming a partnership with Derek Bridgwater, an older Liverpool graduate who had married the daughter of their professor, Sir Charles Reilly – a connection that brought them some housing work in the 1940s. They were later joined by Gabriel Epstein and Peter Hunter.
In architecture the practice was deliberately modest, showing that low-rise brick housing could be built at high densities without the loss of urban character found when tower blocks were set on draughty open spaces. Shepheard believed in the virtues of ‘background’ architecture, an analogy with Georgian terraces first promoted by Reilly and Abercrombie, and well demonstrated in a large development off Royal College Street, Camden, where he achieved high densities with a series of four-storey blocks laid out in traditional squares. The practice’s most significant building was the University of Lancaster, designed in 1963, a dense complex of linked brick buildings cut through by pedestrian covered ways, akin to Shepheard’s early schemes for Stevenage town centre.
In the post-war years, Shepheard turned increasingly to landscape design. A colleague at the wartime Ministry of Town and Country Planning was Hugh Casson, who commissioned him to produce the landscape for the downstream section of the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain. This was both playful and practical, with rocky outcrops, changes of level, and a strategically placed moat around the outdoor seating of the Homes and Gardens Café that prevented customers from escaping without paying. He followed up this success with Modern Gardens, a book published in 1953 that features many small, simple paved gardens from around the world. His own public landscapes included the remodelling of Russell Square (since redesigned), Bunhill Fields, Goldsmith’s Garden, commissioned in 1957, and Bessborough Gardens. He also redesigned the garden at Charleston Farmhouse when it was opened to the public. He combined this increasing speciality with teaching, making annual visits to the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Louis Kahn and also carried out several important landscape schemes. Although he suffered a stroke in 1994 which confined him to a wheelchair, he remained an advisor to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and served on many committees. He was a popular committee man, and he was President of the Architectural Association 1954-1955, President of the Institute of Landscape Architects, 1965-1966, and Master of the Art Workers Guild in its centenary year, 1984, in addition to serving on the Royal Fine Art Commission, the Countryside Commission and many other bodies. He was knighted for his services to architecture in 1980 and awarded the Landscape Institute Gold Medal in 1994.