Waterloo Park, Norwich

Waterloo Park is a public park located in Norwich. It forms one of a set of public parks established in the 1930s by Captain Arnold Sandys-Winsch, and was built by unemployed men using government funding. The original Waterloo parks dates from 1904. When the current park was opened in 1933, it was considered to be the finest park in East Anglia, with a pavilion in the style of Moderne architecture, a bandstand, sports facilities, gardens and a children's playground as part of its design. The herbaceous border is one of the longest in the United Kingdom.

The park's layout has remained largely unchanged since the 1930s, except for the children's garden, the bowling greens and most of the grass tennis courts, which are no longer used for their original purpose. Following a period of relative neglect, the park's main buildings were restored  in 2000, and the long-closed pavilion reopened as a café in 2017. The park is maintained by Norwich City Council.

History
Waterloo Park owes its existence to the work of the Norwich Playing Fields and Open Spaces Society, which saw how the urban population in the Angel Road area of the city was increasing rapidly, and so worked with the authorities to preserve land for use as a recreational space. Land owned by the Great Hospital Trust, surrounded by housing, was leased to the city in 1899. A new park, known at that time as the Catton Recreation Ground, was opened in May 1904, and included gardens created by local schoolchildren. In 1911, a proposal was made by the manufacturer Edwards & Holmes to build a shoe factory on land at Waterloo Park, an idea which never materialised.

The park was completely redesigned in 1929 by Captain Arnold Sandys-Winsch, originally from Cheshire, who had been appointed as the Norwich City Parks and Gardens Superintendent in 1919. With government funding provided to give temporary relief for unemployed local men, work was able to start. At , it was the second largest of a series of parks laid out by Sandys-Winsch in Norwich. The new park was opened in 1933, the last of his parks to be built, at a cost of £37,000. It was "considered to be one of the finest in East Anglia" when it opened to the public in 1933. By the time he had retired in 1956, Sandys-Winsch had helped to create  of urban parks and open spaces, and 20,000 trees. 

The central pavilion was used as a temporary mortuary during the Second World War. After one air raid, the bodies of factory workers from across the other side of the city arrived at the park under police escort, to the horror of people using the nearby tennis courts, who had been unaware of the raid that had happened.

Waterloo Park and its pavilion, pagodas, bandstand and front gates are all designated as Grade II* listed structures, due to the park being considered to be a good example of an early twentieth century municipal park. The overall layout has remained largely unchanged since the 1930s. Since the 1960s, some of the facilities have been modified, so that original features such as the school garden and the moat around the edge of the central garden no longer exist. The park has been recognised by Norwich City Council as an 'historic landscape'. In 1962, £1000 was spent by the council in renovating the pavilion, an expense which was criticized by the local press at the time.

Recent history
The work done by the Countryside Commission in the early 1970s failed to provide for the needs of urban parks in the UK, and after losing its permanent team of dedicated staff, the buildings and landscape within Waterloo Park started to deteriorate. Vandalism and neglect have led to the bowling greens and their pavilions being abandoned. The park was amongst the earliest to be placed on the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in England, when it was included on the list in 1993. In 2000, Norwich City Council was amongst the first recipients to succeed in obtaining funds from the Urban Parks Programme of the  Heritage Lottery Fund to restore its historic parks. It used part of the £5.6 million it received to restore Waterloo Park's pavilion and many of its facilities.

In 2015, Norwich City Council resolved to deal with problems with the water-damaged roof of the pavilion by spending £210,000 on repairs that year, and £40,000 during 2016/17. In 2017, after the main repairs had been completed, the restored pavilion was reopened as a café, as part of an enterprise to assist low-risk prisoners and ex-offenders to gain work experience. Working in partnership with the council, Britannia Enterprises planned to help maintain and restore the park as well as run the café. The café was forced to close in January 2020.

In 2018 the Friends of Waterloo Park was set up, with the initial aim of bringing more sporting opportunities, children's activities and live music to the park. The park was included in the city council's tree planting list for 2018–19, to include the planting of examples of trees that included  silver birch, Himalayan birch, Davidia involucrata and southern magnolia.

Facilities

As a park that, according to George Ismael of Norwich City Council, "represents the last phase of municipal park building in Britain", Waterloo Park has been described as having "stylistic unity" with Norwich's other historic parks, and a design that "displays a sensitive response to the [surrounding] landscape". Everywhere in the park can be accessed by disabled visitors. There are  of gardens, dominated by the bandstand and the Art Deco central pavilion. The park also has a children's playground, tennis courts, and open areas once used to play cricket and hockey, as well as toilet facilities. The pavilion, bandstand, pagodas, steps and walls are all built from reconstituted stone, but which looks realistically natural. 

The park has one of the country's largest herbaceous borders. The flowerbeds, which once contained roses and annuals that were very expensive to maintain, now have plants that can be sustained ecologically, as they are perennials. According to Ismail, this type of planting is a return to the ideas of the gardener William Robinson and the horticulturist  Gertrude Jekyll, and is "completely at one with the period during which the [Norwich] parks were created".

Geography and transport
The park, which is approximately  from Norwich city centre, is bounded on the east by Angel Road. Further west from the western boundary of the park is Aylsham Road (the A1402). To the south, outside the park, is Angel Road Infant School, and Philadelphia lies to the north. It is normally locked during hours of darkness, but does not close before 5:30pm between October and February. There is free parking, accessed from Angel Road, and two bus routes from the city centre pass nearby.

References

Sources

External links

 Information about Waterloo Park (Norwich City Council)
 Pictures (with captions) of the park dating back to the 1950s, from the Eastern Daily Press
 Further information about Captain Arnold Edward Sandys-Winsch and Norwich's city parks from the Colonel Unthank's Norwich website
 Images of Norwich's parks and gardens from George Plunkett's Photographs, including 5 photographs of Waterloo Park that were taken on 30 April 1933, the day after the new park opened.

Category:Parks and open spaces in Norwich