Floral tribute to the saviour of our unique landscapes
Octavia Hill’s legacy as one of the founders of the National Trust will be celebrated with the charity’s first Chelsea Flower Show garden in ten years next week. JANE WARREN takes a sneak peak ahead of the official opening
AS a little girl, Octavia Hill said what she wanted most was not a dolls’ house but a field “so large that I could run in it forever”. Indeed, growing up with nine sisters in the countryside north of London had such a profound impact that it set her on a course destined to help secure the English landscape and its heritage in perpetuity for generations to come.
Along with Robert Hunter and Hardwicke Rawnsley, Hill, then 57, founded the National Trust in 1895 to preserve the natural landscape while providing open spaces for the urban poor. Now her legacy as an advocate of public access to beauty is being commemorated with the Trust’s first RHS Chelsea Flower Show garden for ten years.
As a social reformer, Hill believed in the value of what she imaginatively termed “outdoor sitting rooms” – places where everyone could go to find a strip of sky above their heads and nature all around.
She was also ardent about keeping ancient footpaths open – and opening up new ones.
In keeping with this, award-winning designer Ann-Marie Powell’s Octavia Hill garden, sponsored by Blue Diamond garden centres with the Trust, features a series of beautiful open-air areas filled with flora and fauna that line sloping paths.
At its heart is a pond teeming with plants and insect life.
“My garden is designed to celebrate Octavia’s contemporary nature,” explains Ann-Marie. “We think footpaths are a Godgiven right but many of them only survived because of her. Octavia came from a lot of money and was thrown into a completely different world, which gave her this unique perspective.”
The National Trust is not only about stately homes and gardens; more than 7,000 miles of paths provide free access to the countryside and the coast through its care.
And given that around 80 per cent of the UK population currently live in towns and cities – a figure expected to rise to 90 per cent by 2030 – Ann-Marie believes Hill’s work remains as relevant today as ever.
“Why is this incredible woman not as famous as Florence Nightingale when she should be just as familiar to us?” she says. “Octavia is nothing less than saviour of our landscapes, without whom many would never have been protected.
“She stopped a railway being built through the Lake District and she fought and fought for access to outdoor space.”
Preventing a major road being built across north London’s beautiful Hampstead Heath by fundraising to buy the land and campaigning against the plan was one of Hill’s incredible achievements.
She also coined the term “green belt” in 1875 as part of an unsuccessful campaign to save Swiss Cottage Fields from development.
“Like a modern-day crowdfunder, Octavia took a leading part in rousing public opinion and raising money for numerous projects,” says her ancestor Clare Armstrong, the greatgrand-daughter of her father’s first cousin.
“Octavia was so far ahead of her time – you had to be incredibly strong to have influence as a woman back then.Today, we would call her an activist and campaigner – her vision remains so topical.”
The eighth daughter of James and Caroline Hill, Octavia delighted in jumping streams and climbing trees. She was home-educated by her mother, who had been a teacher at the school in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, founded by Hill’s corn merchant father.
After a series of crop failures led to bankruptcy, he lost his mind and Caroline fled to the London home of her own father, a doctor, with her brood of daughters. Hill, then 14, found herself supporting working-class women who had fallen into poverty.
Her job was helping the toymakers – destitute young women who laboriously created intricate dolls’ house furniture for sale.
If they were absent from the Ladies Cooperative Guild for any reason, she began visiting them at home and was horrified by the conditions in which she found them. So she started organising outings into green spaces for the toymakers in her charge.
MODEST, yet strong-willed and full of conviction, Hill remained frustrated until her death in 1912 by the rich custodians of London’s private squares who refused to open them for public access, despite a lack of green spaces in the city centre for working people.
“She was such a forward-thinking person,” says Ann-Marie.
“If she was alive today, like Shakespeare, there is no question they would both be using TikTok to get their message across. Octavia would be out there using it to champion poor communities in urban environments.”
Now the National Trust is determined to ensure her enduring impact on the preservation of landscape – from urban pocket gar
dens to parklands designed by Capability Brown and beautiful coastal wildernesses – is forgotten no more, with its Chelsea Flower Show garden.
“I didn’t want it to feel like a garden commemorating a historical figure when she was so contemporary, so I’ve imagined her garden as a slice of a brownfield site in London’s Southwark, known as the Red Cross Garden, that was one of Octavia’s first open spaces projects. It’s the abstract ideal of all that Octavia represents,” explains AnnMarie. “Because I needed a really clear picture in my mind of what I was doing for Chelsea, I ‘became’ Octavia Hill, imagining this site and putting everything through the Octavia ‘filter’.
“I started to think we needed to bring the whole of the National Trust’s work into this imagined garden at Chelsea.”
Materials include a fallen oak from National Trust woodlands, reclaimed York stone paving from numerous properties, carved oak retaining walls and benches where the public are invited to linger.
“I wanted the carvings by sculptor Kate Harahan to capture what
Octavia stood for – the beauty and delicacy of all that is in nature,” the designer continues. “The more you look at the carvings, the more you see. “And when you see it, you want to preserve it. So many children don’t have any idea where nature comes from.”
The garden is also future-proofed against climate change, with drought-tolerant planting, an aspect that Ann-Marie thinks Hill would have championed had she been alive today, together with wheelchair and accessibility access. People may think of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest and Natural Beauty, as the institution was known at its inception in 1894, simply as “fancy houses”, as Ann-Marie puts it. But the Trust today is about so much more, with urban community gardens and thousands of acres of wild open spaces, including coastal locations. And Hill’s early vision stretched well beyond the preservation of stately homes for which the charity is perhaps most famous. In fact, she started small and very local – with footpaths.
“All three founders of the National Trust were active in the defence of footpaths,” says Liz Nelstrop, its Outdoor Experiences Consultant.
Hill spoke of how the “little winding, quiet byways with all their beauty were vanishing… the public… hardly knowing of the decision which has forever closed to them some lovely walk”.
The area around her own adult home in Kent’s hills is criss-crossed by footpaths saved by her and her associates.
QUEEN Victoria was so impressed by Hill that she invited her to the 1887 Jubilee celebrations in Westminster Abbey, where a memorial stone now commemorates her work.
“Looking across the smoggy streets she saw the need for green space, not through science but by instinct,” says Liz. “She wanted to make access to outside space inclusive and equitable.”
In 1930, just two decades after Hill’s death at the age of 73, the former secretary of the National Trust, Sir Lawrence Chubb, spoke movingly of her achievements: “When the time comes for the historian to apportion the credit to those who have helped to save the commons and footpaths of England for the enjoyment of the whole community, I have no doubt he will attribute much of the success to the influence and self-sacrificing work of Octavia Hill.”
At last, with the Chelsea Flower Show National Trust garden, long-overdue recognition is finally being received. “It’s dreadful that there is no requirement for urban developers to increase green space in their planning proposals,” adds Ann-Marie.
“That would have incensed Octavia. Doing work like this, you find yourself constantly reaching into the future, as she did. She basically wanted people to be together outdoors. I think she would bloody love this garden.”
●●The Chelsea Flower Show, featuring the Octavia Hill Garden by Blue Diamond garden centres with the National Trust, opens Tuesday and runs until Saturday in London. For more information and bookings, visit rhs.org.uk