Arthur Measure's Guide to Warwick 1995 link below
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cxkpZoW5C-hQIBpctWlc2mFPFrKcH94E/view?usp=sharing
A very common question raised by visitors to Warwick Town, knowing it is listed as being on the River Avon, is “Where is the River Avon”? I have been a regular visitor to Warwick for over 50 years and I never located the River Avon in the town thinking the only access to it was through St Nicholas Park on the outskirts along the Banbury Road. The location of the Warwick Castle seemed to prevent all access to the River Avon. Then suddenly in 2019 whilst researching a new book being published by me on Warwick based upon the essays of Steven Walsgrove (Deceased) did I venture down Mill Street to the amazing Mill Garden at the bottom overlooking the ruins of the 14th Century Old Warwick Bridge over the River Avon alongside the Old Castle Mill. Vehicle access down Mill Street is a nightmare with virtually no parking so it had never been a location you would visit. At Mill Garden you suddenly experience a whole different perspective of Warwick. Sited right up against the Castle walls the old bridge lead to an idyllic area called Bridge End. To visit Bridge End you have to go along way around to get to it by walking over the new Castle Bridge along the Banbury Road to get to the traffic island before turning right. You then enter a whole new world of tranquillity which would have been a busy hamlet called Bridge End before the bridge was destroyed.
So
why is Arthur Measure’s Visitor’s Guide to Warwick so significant. Well Arthur
Measure is a Warwick legend who spent his life renovating the Mill Garden. Here is the link to his Guardian Obituary but I have also copied out the contents and pasted it below so there no need to use the link.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/nov/17/guardianobituaries.maevkennedy
Copyright the Guardian
Arthur
Measures (1909 – 1999) Obituary
A small town
garden, at the foot of a steep narrow lane in Warwick, is known to thousands of
visitors. By the time it closed at the end of the season, the home-made
collecting box was expected to have gathered £100,000 for charity. Arthur
Measures, who has died aged 90, and had lived in the town from childhood, was
the quietly remarkable creator of that garden in Mill Street.
I met him
only once, two years ago. He had been worryingly ill but was determined to talk
about his last great campaign - to acquire for the public and restore the
tattered, but magnificent, 18th-century landscape gardens of Warwick Castle,
then under threat of development. I was warned to stay only 30 minutes. Hours
later, on a bitterly cold, foggy winter day - after Arthur had stopped to talk
to every favourite plant in the garden - I had to march him back into his house
and physically force him into his armchair.
He became
famous for his garden, but he was loved by people who wouldn't know a rose from
a mangle wurzle. As manager of the main Birmingham branch of Barclays Bank, his
kindness was legendary. He backed his hunches in loans which defied all
conventional banking wisdom.
Every
morning, he sat with his deputy and opened all the day's post in the main hall,
surrounded by the staff. A colleague recalls him opening one letter and
throwing it in the air with a whoop of triumph: "I threw him a gnat and
he's swallowed a camel!" he cried, learning that his head office manager
had resignedly backed one of his more eccentric decisions.
It seems
likely that his kindness, particularly to people who ran their lives into
bramble thickets, came from his unusual childhood. He was born in Manchester
but moved, aged one, into the Warwick workhouse, where his parents, who were
master and matron, brought up a family of six. He saw a system which would have
been familiar to Dickens and how easily poverty could tip decent people into
destitution.
He married a
local Warwick woman, Violet Bray, in 1936, and they moved into the cottage at
the end of Mill Street and started planting. They made a cottage garden on an
exuberant scale, framing absurdly picturesque views of the great flank of
Warwick Castle, and the ruins of the medieval bridge across the River Avon. It
was originally opened for one weekend to raise money to restore the St Mary's
church tower. But gradually Arthur and Violet acquired a string of other
charities - 35 at the last count - and eventually their garden opened from
Easter to October.
In 1959, his
friends in the Mill Street cottages discovered their houses were about to be
sold over their heads by the Earl of Warwick, along with 150 other properties.
The sale was as a single lot, so none of his neighbours had any chance of
bidding. To outbid a Birmingham property developer, Arthur Measures organised a
syndicate - with a Barclays loan, of course - bought all the cottages for
£610,000, and divided up the leases.
He took
early retirement from the bank after 42 years because of ill-health and died
close to the garden he loved. The news went round the world. At the suggestion
of dozens of friends, his children David and Julia will establish a fund to
preserve the garden, and keep it open in his memory.
Arthur
Bradley Measures, banker and horticulturist, born September 1 1909; died
September 19 1999
End of Obituary
When I visited the Mill
Gardens I asked the woman taking the entrance fee if I could take some
photographs. It turned out that she was Julia one of Arthur’s children and she
was fine with the taking of the photographs but asked if I could include a
copyright statement as follows:-
“Photos of the Medieval Bridge by Kind Permission of
David and Julia Russell of the Mill Street Gardens.”
Now back to the booklet called “Arthur Measure’s Visitor’s Guide to Warwick”. It is an exceptional
piece of work which combines historical background inclusive of a hand drawn
map clearly referenced with the locations of all the roads and places of interest
within Warwick. The sketches by Christine Measures are of a very flamboyant pen
and ink style which capture the essence of each of the locations. Under
Attractive Walks the listed “From Church Street, along TINK-A-TANK to the
Butts, back through the College Garden and round the Church yard” always has an
air of mystery about it since the name evolved, evidently, from the sound of
hard shoes on the path amplified by the adjacent walls.
I will not give any more away
since many more aspects of Warwick will be covered in my new book on Warwick on
sale at Amazon later in the year. (2024). In the meantime my Tour Guide of
Stratford upon Avon based upon the Pencil Sketches by Joseph Pike (1929) adopts
a similar approach.
Buy from Amazon using this
link.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0950871877
Viewed from Mill Garden, Mill Street, Warwick
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