C O N T E X T 1 1 9 : M A Y 2 0 1 1 21 Healthy environments Healthy environments Healthy environments environments Healthy Healthy environme environments Healthy environments CHRIS POND A fruitful day in the country A conservation area on the edge of Epping Forest has its roots in the 19th century’s health and wellbeing movement, and its mass-catering temperance refreshment industry. Conservation area appraisals and local research can throw up a whole range of interesting facts. Most often these are of purely local interest, but sometimes discoveries can be set against a wider context, a chapter in the previous history of an area that has national or wider implications. This is an account of the antecedents of one conservation area, which came about through research for a local coda to Pevsner, my Buildings of Loughton (2nd edition, 2010), and for the appraisal for Epping Forest District Council. Staples Road in the Essex town of Loughton is a narrow lane which marks the very boundary of the built up area and the open vistas of Epping Forest. In it stands a rather smart Victorian house, of the cottage orné type, complete with that ne plus ultra of suburban life, the electrically-operated car entrance. But this is no Barratt Homes pastiche of 1999. It is the last relic of what was once a considerable social undertaking, the mass-catering temperance refreshment industry in inland spas and resorts. In Victorian and Edwardian times, most people could not afford holidays. Their only time away from the drudgery of cities was probably a bank holiday among the lakes, trees, moors or meadows that surrounded most of those cities. Four or five years after the railway came to Loughton in 1856, more than 10,000 day-trippers were routinely accommodated on a summer Sunday. If you were a nonconformist, and most working people were chapel rather than church, the pub was not an institution you could visit in your day in the country. Certainly no Sunday school outing or beanfeast would ever use one. Entrepreneurs were not slow to fill the gap. Every cottager offered tea and sandwiches. Tearooms sprang up near the pubs, or sometimes distant from them. A man called John Riggs established what he called retreats, in four places in Epping Forest, where 2–3,000 people at a time could be fed. John Dean set up his Melbourn Retreat in Staples Road, Loughton in 1879. He ran it for the public as a modest tea room in the ornate cottage, with seating for about 100 in stable-like brick outbuildings in the tea garden, which led down to the Loughton Brook. In 1894, the Dean enterprise was sold to an altogether bigger player, the Ragged School Union (RSU), which developed it as a centre to cater for poor schoolchildren from inner London, who were bought out en masse by train to enjoy a day in the country. The fare and meal for each child cost about a shilling, for which charitable donation was solicited. The retreat house was enlarged by the architect Percy Warman, who gave his services gratis, and the feeding capability increased by the same practitioner designing three large sheds, like Dutch barns, of iron, lined with matchboarding. By this means, 1,250 children a day could be accommodated. Only after vociferous complaints from genteel middle-class Loughton of scrumping, immoral behaviour, pollution of the brook and the general use of the countryside as a lavatory did the RSU realise that it had to organise the children, which meant supervision and extra cost. When Sir Arthur Pearson’s Fresh Air Fund chipped in the cash, the enterprise became not only regimented but respectable. Loughton enjoyed a Royal visit most years, when the king or one of the princes came to open the season at the Shaftesbury Retreat. This retreat came to an end in 1939, when it was requisitioned by the urban district council for use as a war mortuary. It was returned to the Shaftesbury Society, successors to the RSU, in 1946, and they leased the barns out as a glass factory.This lasted until 1969, when the land was put up for sale for residential development. The retreat house was sold to the last caretaker, and survived as the unique reminder of a social enterprise that saw kings and princes dine within its modest walls in homage to the charitable entertainment of the poor in Paradise. In the same street as the retreat were two other notable establishments of the health and wellbeing movement. When the Loughton National School (TH Watson, 1863) became redundant in 1913, the RSU acquired it and renamed it the Ashley Camp House. Whereas the retreat was used for day trips, the Camp House was used for rehabilitative purposes as an open air school, ©iStockphoto.com/Whitemay
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=