PIERREMONT was a palace fit for a Pease. It was known as “the Buckingham Palace of Darlington” and, in its heyday, visitors came by special excursion train from Newcastle to wander among its horticultural wonders.
Through the fruit trees, round the Italian gardens, over the American ground with its Fort Augusta-style blooms, beneath the rose canopy and around the artificial lake – complete with an island which featured an Alpine scene with a waterfall and had a heated party room hidden in the rock – to the fountain which was the centrepiece of the Pierremont park.
The 20ft fountain, known as the Pierremont Vase, was the finest in the north. It featured exotic goldfish swimming in its bowl, which had 12 classical urns around it, and there were 21 jets spurting out of the top tiers to form a sculpture in spray of the Prince of Wales’s feathers.
It seems to have been a bespoke fountain specifically designed for the “laird of Pierremont”, Henry Pease (above), a younger son of Edward “the father of the railways” Pease and brother of Joseph whose statue stands on High Row.
Henry, the South Durham MP in the 1850s and 1860s, drove the railway from Barnard Castle over Stainmore across some of the world’s most remarkable viaducts; the railway resort of Saltburn was also his brainchild.
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Henry had a summer residence at Stanhope Castle in Weardale and a holiday home on the clifftop at Saltburn, and he developed the park of Pierremont in the 1860s so that in six years from 1870, 10,000 people – including the excursionists – visited its open days.
On a hot day, a ton of water evaporated from the waterfall alone, and there may even have been a subterranean passage under the lake so that party-goers could reach the heated room in the Alpine rock on the island.
Henry died in 1881 and his widow, Mary, lived on in Pierremont until her death in 1909, at which point developers pounced on the estate, covering it with streets. The last was Pierremont Gardens, which was driven over the site of the fountain and across the lake.
The lake was filled in and the builder Cuthbert Todd, a councillor, donated the fountain to South Park, where it was unveiled in the sub-tropical corner on June 10, 1925, by Alderman Tommy Crooks, chairman of the Parks Committee.
"In turning on the water,” reported The Northern Echo, “Ald Crooks said he hoped it would be flowing until the millennium."
It didn’t. By the turn of the millennium, it was in a sorry state, waterless, vandalised and weed infested. Yet in 2004, Darlington council won £4m from the National Lottery to restore the park and the fountain.
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This inspired a reader to call the Memories desk and invite us to her home in Pierremont Gardens – well, to invite us into her foundations.
Just inside the front door, we eased a couple of paraquet blocks out of her floor and dropped down into the foundations where, amid the cobwebs of the centuries and the dust of the decades, was the original bowl of the Pierremont Vase. Builder Todd had simply built her house over the top of it, rather than break up the mid-1860s concrete and cart it off.
We blew some of the dust off and discovered Henry Pease had been cheating: he’d painted the bowl an attractive Mediterranean blue to set off the gold of his fish rather than have them swimming around the grey that characterises many Darlo days.
By 2006, the restoration was complete and for at least one glorious summer, the 21 jets spurted again.
But now they spurt no more, and seven of the 12 urns around the bowl have been broken by vandals.
This week, a meeting of the town’s largest companies was brokered by MP Peter Gibson to see if, amid the cost-of-living crisis, there was any appetite for contributing to a restoration. It would be a big and long term project, with initial surveys to assess what needs to be done costing several thousand pounds and the full work expected to run well in to six figures.
It would be fabulous if the finest fountain in the north, built as the centrepiece for one of the greatest gardens in the North East at the Buckingham Palace of Darlington, was once again fit for a king. Watch this space…
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