Just south of the old Roman Town of St Albans, in
countryside that has inspired writers such as George
Bernard Shaw, E.M. Forster and Jane Austen, lie the
secluded grounds of The Arboretum.

The Arboretum is a world that offers the timeless
elegance of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 bedroom traditional
homes and well-proportioned apartments, all set
within acres of mature wooded parkland.

Napsbury Park History:

Napsbury Park was designed to serve as a hospital by architect Rowland Plumbe in 1900, who also rebuilt, to his designs, the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel in 1897. 

Designed for 1,205 residents, Napsbury opened, following the construction of the numerous buildings and extensive grounds on June 3, in 1905.  According to Middlesex County Record, the initial cost, including land and equipment, was £545,000, or £473 per bed.  In 1908 Plumbe designed an extension to accommodate a further 600 patients.
During the First World War, Napsbury was used for and known as the County of Middlesex War Hospital, which tended for soldiers wounded at the Front. Following this, in the late 1920s a nurses’ home was also added to the site, further adding to the variety of different buildings and facilities at the site.

 Although Napsbury suffered some bomb damaged in the Blitz, it was in continuous use as a hospital until its closure in 2000.  Due to its stunning, and largely untouched, parkland, Napsbury was listed by English Heritage as a Grade II Historic Park and Garden in 2001.

 Crest Nicholson, which specialises in creating new communities from redundant land and estates, seized the opportunity to acquire the site and to create a unique community, centred on the preservation and conservation of both the architectural and botanical heritage of the site.

 William Goldring – A Leading Light of Kew:

As befits the creation of a residential version of Kew Gardens at Napsbury, the grounds themselves were created by a man to whom Kew was an integral part of his botanical career - William Goldring. 

 A celebrated garden writer and landscape gardener, William Goldring was born at West Dean, near Chichester in May 1854 and came to Kew in 1875, where he was in charge of the Herbaceous Department at the world-famous botanical garden. 

 After leaving Kew in 1879, he carried on his career in the botanical profession, firstly as assistant editor of The Garden and, soon after, editor of Woods and Forests, which he edited until 1886.  While pursuing his career in journalism, he started to practise landscaping gardening which started to take up more and more of his time.  In 1887, he left journalism fully to set up his own landscape architect practice. 

 His first important work was the transformation of the then-market gardens at Earl’s Court into the famed Exhibition Grounds of fairground attractions, cafés and gardens.  This work threw him into international prominence when, on the back of this success, the Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew personally recommended him for the prestigious commission to lay out the extensive Italian gardens at Makurpuri for the Gaekwar and Government of Baroda, Gujarat, India.  He was aided in the project by many Old Kewites, including, Henry, Krumbeigel and Cavanagh, who finished the project on his behalf. 

 His projects in England include stately homes, parks, public spaces and hospitals, and he is known to have worked considerably overseas, a particular highlight being his work for Baron Rothschild at Chateau Laversine near Chantilly in the southwest of France.  Elements of his work survive at Hatfield House, Welbeck, Cobham Hall, Dorchester Borough Gardens, Dublin’s Phoenix Park and, of course, Napsbury.  He is credited with working on nearly 700 different garden landscape projects in England alone. 

 His association with Kew continued throughout his working career and he was President of Kew Guild  (the association of past and present staff who worked at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew) in 1914 and was a member of its committee for many years until his death in 1919.

 ‘Garden pictures of great beauty and interest’

 His obituary in The Gardeners’ Chronicle, March 1st 1919 refers to him “having a wide and intimate knowledge of trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants, and their development, as well as possessing imagination and the artistic perception and able to create garden pictures of great beauty and interest.”

 This knowledge and ability is extremely clear from his work at Napsbury and is recognised by its English Heritage listing.  Goldring designed the parkland in his middle period, circa 1902, in the informal style and using a huge palette of tree and shrub species, incorporating existing trees, to create a mature parkland environment to help the healing process.

 The extensive grounds consist of a number of different botanical features that segment the sweeping space and give form and structure to the estate.  The planting features both native and exotic species, as befits a man so widely travelled.

 The general parkland consists of large expanses of mown grass punctuated by mature individual trees, many of which already existed at the site when Goldring designed his planting, and feature such species as Ash, Hornbeam, Horse Chestnut, Norway Maple, Oak, Red Cedar and Poplar.  Similar species form a shelterbelt around the outskirts of the estate and also form little copses, where wildlife and birds nest in great numbers.

 As Napsbury consisted of different groups of buildings spread throughout its boundaries, stately avenues criss-cross the grounds with elegant lines of Cedar, Cherry, Lime, Cypress and Horse Chestnut trees which correspond to former and existing roads and paths.   There are also numerous formal hedges, which delineate former exercise areas and lawns, of such species as Hawthorn, Yew, Privet and Laurel, all of which are excellent in attracting and conserving wildlife.

 Particularly surrounding the larger buildings, there are a number of large informal groupings of exotic and native ornamental shrubs, in typical Victorian, predominately evergreen planting, which feature Forsythia, Mahonia, Mock Orange, Aucuba, Laurustinus, Berberis, Spirea, Viburnum and numerous holly bushes.

 There is also a fruit orchard, the last remant of Napsbury’s home farm and kitchen garden, which had a variety of vegetables and herbs and served the double purpose of being for consumption as well as to engage the patients’ in gentle physical activity.  The orchard has apple trees, pear trees and cherry trees, among many others.

 The sensitivity and expertise which Goldring asserted on the grounds of Napsbury have seen them survive for over a hundred years, largely unchanged.  Crest Nicholson is committed to ensuring that they remain so for many years to come.

 Napsbury – An architectural masterpiece:

Roland Plumbe F.R.I.B.A, (1838-1919), the architect of Napsbury, specialised in church and institutional architecture such as schools, colleges and government buildings.

 His design in 1900 for Napsbury represented a move away from the more institutional approach to hospital design into the more ‘homely’ country estate style and setting.  Throughout the extensive grounds, innovative, villa-style properties were scattered around the main complex of buildings.

 As with any grand Victorian country house estate, when Napsbury was first built, the landscape comprised ornamented drives, lodges, avenues, parkland, home farm, kitchen gardens and glasshouses and even its own cricket ground, which still survives today.

 The hospital buildings themselves, as with many buildings in the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, contain a mix of architectural styles.  Most of the buildings on the site are two-storey and built in the elegant ‘Neo Jacobean’ style but with numerous Arts and Crafts architectural embellishments such as decorated chimneys, porches, cupolas, gabled roofs, spires, turrets and clock towers. 

 The most decorated and dominant period buildings are the main hospital and associated echelon buildings including the East and West Hospitals, all of which are being refurbished.

 The main hospital was built in the style of a great country mansion, with its characteristic side wings, echoing the great country mansions of the day, such as Sandringham, which it closely resembles in style. The East and West Hospitals were specifically designed to mimic the Dower and Lodge houses that are often found within the grounds of great country estates.

 Fronted with red brick, the buildings feature bay and mullion sash timber-framed windows, gabled roofs covered with slate and ornamental porches with striking feature relief brickwork to the bays.  The echelon buildings are also dominated by a soaring water tower, topped by a striking turret with four integral bay windows and wrought-iron railed viewing platform.

 Louis Wain – Inspired at Napsbury:

Louis Wain, the internationally celebrated cat artist, stayed at Napsbury as a long-term resident during the 1930s and it was there that he was inspired to create some of his most famous works.

 Louis Wain was born on 5th August 1860, the eldest of five children of William Matthew Wain, a textile traveller from Staffordshire and Felicia who was a freelance fabric and carpet designer.  He studied at the West London School of Art where he later became an Assistant Master.

 Following his marriage to Emily in 1884 and now a full-time artist, they bought a black and white kitten named Peter and shortly after Louis started to visit the then popular Cat Shows.  Louis did many sketches of Peter for Emily’s amusement, and it was she who encouraged him to submit his picture “A Kitten’s Christmas Party” to the Illustrated London News.  Requests for his cat pictures came flooding in and his love of cats grew into a passion. 

 Tragically widowed in 1887, Louis had a great deal of success illustrating books and postcards and the majority of his paintings and drawings featured mischievous cats in a variety of anthropomorphic situations such as playing cards, dancing or sitting around tables.   Louis became President of the National Cat Club at the age of 30 in 1890 and he also spent 2 years in the United States, where he was extremely popular and became involved with the American Cat Fancy.

 His work fell out of favour during the First World War due to a change in public taste.  Always an eccentric character, he became depressed and his health gradually deteriorated and he required long-term hospital care and treatment during the 1920s. 

 During Louis’ stay at a number of hospitals and his final long stay at Napsbury, Louis continued to paint, incorporating cats into intricate patterns and bold colours as well as an increasing number featuring landscapes, inspired it is said by the beautiful grounds of the hospital itself, a notable example being ‘A Tea Party at Napsbury’. 

 He gave away many of his pictures to members of the hospital staff and also painted on the fabric of the hospital, including the mirrors.   It was noted that he was extremely content just to sit in the gardens and draw, and he continued to do so up until his death from kidney failure on 4th July 1939, a month before his 79th birthday.

 Location: St Albans – Hertfordshire’s first town

The Arboretum is located just to the south of the historic Roman city of St Albans in an area historically famous for its grain, orchard and berry farms.  Due to its proximity to London and good agriculture, St. Albans became a focus for trade and settlement and as a result became Hertfordshire's oldest town, first noted as Verlamion, 'the settlement above the Marsh', in the Iron Age. 

After the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, it developed as Verulamium and became the third largest town in Roman Britain.  Built mainly of wood, it was destroyed during the revolt of Boudicca in AD 60-61 but was rebuilt, including many impressive public buildings.  Some of these buildings, its amphitheatre and walls can still be seen today in Verulamium Park.

After the departure of the Romans in AD 410, the town slowly declined and the city fell into decay.  Close to the site of the execution of St. Alban, Britain’s first Christian martyr, you can still find Roman bricks removed from Verulamium in the walls of the historic Abbey’s Norman Tower, which was built in 793AD.  St Albans soon developed into a town of significance and was one of the five chosen venues by the barons and clergy in 1213 for the drafting of Magna Carta.

The town prospered for many hundreds of years, catering for travellers and pilgrims and, by the 19th century, was a market town with industries such as brewing and hat manufacture.  With the arrival of the mainline train to London in 1868, St. Albans became a popular place to live as people increasingly appreciated living in a town filled with historical significance.  In 1877 it received a Royal Charter giving the town City status and the Abbey Church became a Cathedral.

The 20th century has seen St. Albans continue to develop as a beautiful commuter town.  Maintaining its distinctive eclectic character, today Roman ruins sit happily next to Georgian townhouses and picturesque alleyways, whilst timber shops rub shoulders with modern high streets, bars and quality restaurants.  As throughout its long history, St Albans continues to attract tourists and those looking to escape the hustle and bustle of London in equal measure. 

 St Albans – key dates:

End of First Century B.C A large settlement of the Celtic Catuvellauni tribe established themselves and was known as Verlamion.

A.D.50 The Roman City of Verulamium, founded.

60 Verulamium destroyed by Queen Boudicca (Boadicea).

79 The Forum and Basilica opened.

155 Much of Verulamium destroyed by fire.

3rd Century Alban, a citizen of Verulamium, martyred for his Christian faith.

c. 275 City wall built enclosing 80 hectares.

c. 450 By this date the Roman City had almost ceased to exist.

730 The historian Bede recorded that a " beautiful church worthy of his (Albans) martyrdom was built, where sick people are healed and frequent miracles take place to this day". At this time St.Albans/Verulamium was known as Watlingchester or Verulamchester. Originally Watling Street was the name given to the road from London to St. Albans.

793 St. Albans Abbey "founded" by King Offa of Mercia. Eventually the town of St Albans grew up around the Abbey.

1077 Paul of Caen, the first Norman Abbot began rebuilding the Abbey.

1086 At the time of Domesday Book about 500 people lived in the town.

1213 Council held at the Abbey at which Barons and Churchmen first discussed their grievances - this was the first step towards the Magna Carta of 1215.

1217 After the Magna Carta was ignored by King John, the barons invited French help to depose him. The Dauphin of France occupied the town in 1217. A month later the army of the new young King led by the notorious Faulkes de Breaute sacked the town. A few months later the Dauphin returned to the town.

1327 The townsmen laid siege to the Abbey in pursuit of their claims to greater independence.

1381 The Great or Peasants Revolt gave the townsmen an opportunity to press their claims again. The abbots, warrens and woods were broken into, four houses destroyed and the prison broken open.

1455 The First Battle of St. Albans opened the War of the Roses. The Lancastrian army led by King Henry VI occupied the town but the Yorkist forces of the Duke of Warwick managed to break in and a battle took place in the town centre. King Henry was wounded by an arrow and captured.

1461 The Second Battle of St. Albans led to victory for the Lancastrians under Queen Margaret who brought her forces down Watling Street from Dunstable. Much of the fighting took place on Bernards Heath, north of the town, and the Yorkists in retreat left the King (who had been released from his first captivity at St. Albans and then retaken) sitting under an oak tree on Nomansland common.

1539 The Abbey was dissolved on Dec. 5th by King Henry VIII.

1553 King Edward VI granted a charter to the town by which it became a Borough with a Mayor and Corporation. The King sold the Abbey Church to the town for £400

1643 The High Sheriff of Hertfordshire was arrested by Captain Oliver Cromwell after he had unwisely read a Royal Proclamation from the steps of the Eleanor Cross. Later that year the town was the headquarters of the Earl of Essex's Parliamentary Army.

1645 The New Model Army was reviewed by Fairfax at St. Albans.

1648 An Army Council was held in the Abbey Church which effectively sealed the fate of King Charles I.

1877 The Abbey Church was granted Cathedral status and the town a City charter.

THE ARBORETUM EARNS ITS CREDITS AS A TOP FILMING LOCATION
 Cameras have, once again, been rolling at The Arboretum, Crest Nicholson’s impressive transformation of the former Victorian Napsbury Hospital and its grounds situated south of St Albans. A number of scenes have been filmed for ITV’s chilling new thriller starring Robert Carlyle.

 The Arboretum – which features a stunning range of newly built and refurbished apartments and houses – was chosen by a leading production company to film key scenes for the forthcoming psychological drama named ‘Class of ‘76’. This two part, feature length drama is being aired on the 3rd and 4th of October 2005 at 9pm.

“We chose the Arboretum for one of our characters who was scripted as living in a modern, stylish apartment,” says Ian Hogan, Location Manager at Zenith Entertainment. “We initially visited the show apartment, and were very impressed with the space and layout of the properties, as they offered us many interesting angles for our shooting. I approached some residents individually, and was then able to offer the director a choice of apartments. They were all very different, but with a unique character in keeping with the brief.”

Class of ’76, a tense two-part drama, follows the investigations of Det. Insp. Tom Monroe (played by Carlyle) into a series of deaths, whose victims are all from the same primary school class. Monroe first probes the death – an apparent suicide – of Pat Fisher, who has left behind a tape and other clues referring to his school class – the class of ’76 – in a primary school in the seaside town of Cornton. Monroe finds newspaper cuttings and photographs dating back to 1976, when in July of that year, 10-year old Amy Irvine, one of Fisher’s fellow classmates, was murdered.

 Since then two other pupils from the same class have died “accidentally” and Fisher warns his schoolmates on the tape that the deaths won’t be suicide or accidental. Then Monroe visits Cornton and begins to delve into the history of the deaths from the class of ’76…

 t’s not the first time that location filming has taken place at The Arboretum. Scenes for BBC1’s Eastenders have also recently been filmed on location at the development. Extensive filming for BBC’s ‘What Not to Wear’, which features presenters Suzannah Constantine and Trinny Woodhall, has also taken place at another of Crest’s flagship developments, 100 Westminster Bridge Road in central London. In this instance, a penthouse apartment with priceless views of the Thames and across the Capital was used as the base for this TV makeover pair.