Unnamed reserve within Kaiber and Wilkie Avenues, Yanchep, Western Australia

It is arguably unusual to find such choice real estate with views to the Indian Ocean not only preserved as open land, but also to find that it is entirely unmanaged and there is no encouragement to enter it, much less use it. See below for link to google map.

It can be found here.

The origin of this space is yet to be ascertained. The first (?) portion of this estate, the Yanchep Beach Estate launched by Peet & Co sometime in the mid-1960s (a guesstimate based on the appearance of the Yanchep Beach Estate catalogue found at the State LIbrary of WA) included all of Wilkie Avenue and a small section of Kaiber Avenue, i.e. the west and north boundaries of the block in question. Access space was made between lots 47 and 46, and lots 41 and 40, through from Wilkie, but at the time of the initial launch there was nothing to access to - at least, as far as the published plan was concerned. Lots 86 (at the western end of Wilkie) and 67 (on the western side of Wilkie adjoining a 'footway' from Smith Court to Wilkie) were designated 'Public Open Space' and 'Open Space' respectively. The only other point of (nominal) interest is that the street names were claimed to be 'of historical importance' in the initial Peet booklet: they were the surnames of the men involved in an ill-fated overland expedition in the region. Smith, for whom Smith Court is named, died in the Yanchep area. (Yanchep Beach Estate booklet, PR8679/YAN/4 in Battye Library, State Library of Western Australia)

Geddes in Edinburgh - 2

We then continued to some of the spaces attributed to Geddes as one contributor to a broader 1893 Sanitary Improvement Scheme for the Edinburgh Old Town. Johnson and Rosenburg talk of Geddes' attempts 'to find sensitive ways of "opening out" interior spaces within the existing street block in order to create more healthful courts and quadrangles. These re-designed interior spaces needed to be accessible (or in current architectural terminology "permeable") from the bounding streets...' On the same page (114) they quote Geddes himself advocating the letting of 'light and air' into 'slums and closes'.

The images above are all from Wardrop's Court, of which Johnson and Rosenburg write (p.115):

The treatment of Wardrop's Court is a particularly complex example of 'conservative surgery'. Geddes was given delegated responsibility for the supervision of property acquisition on Council's behalf and for the preparation of a detailed renewal plan. The physical solution for Wardrop's Court is more difficult to appreciate than the iconic Ramsay Garden development, but in many respects it provides a better indication of the subtle creativity that Geddes was able to apply to the mediaeval fabric of the Old Town.

The site containing Wardrop's Court occupies a key location along the Royal Mile, where Bank Street and the Mound are linked to George IV Bridge. Within the official boundaries of the designated site, there was a dense warren of dilapidated buildings behind the main frontages on the north side of the Lawnmarket and the west and north sides of the curving North Bank Street. Four narrow wynds provided access to the crowded interior 'backlands' via openings in the Lawnmarket facade. Two ancient merchant's houses - Gladstone's Land dating from around 1550 and Lady Stair's House dating from 1622 - were also located within the official boundaries of the improvement site. These historic buildings were scheduled for retention with varying degrees of modification.

Another of Geddes' courts, nearby, is Riddle's Close, harder to photograph in any way which gives a proper sense of the space. I will however put up some of my photographs from this locale in a future post.

Geddes in Edinburgh -1

In September 1925, Lewis Mumford spent a week with Patrick Geddes in Edinburgh, a time he found both frustrating and happy: 'he took me about the city,' Mumford wrote, 'showed me the hundred improvements that he had made or initiated; waste spaces become gardens, courts tidied, tenements renovated...'*

During my brief stay in Edinburgh in October last year I was lucky enough to take a short tour, of portions of Edinburgh remodelled by Patrick Geddes in the early 20th century, with Lou Rosenburg - author (with Jim Johnson) of the recent Renewing Old Edinburgh: The Enduring Legacy of Patrick Geddes (Argyll Publishing, Edinburgh 2010).

Our tour began with a brief visit to Ramsay Garden of which, Johnson and Rosenburg write:

'Geddes... created Ramsay Garden on a sloping site adjacent to the Castle Esplanade. This remarkable housing development resulted from his fruitful collaboration with two talented architects, S. Henbest Capper and Sydney Mitchell. On this dramatic and difficult site, an L-shaped configuration of flatted accommodation was created through an imaginative blending of new construction and adaptations to older buildings. The end product was a colourful vertical composition, with a mix of harl and timber, grey slates, red tiles and red sandstone, grouped on the Castlehill side around a lovely, semi-enclosed communal garden.' (p. 75)




* Lewis Mumford 'Note written after visit with Geddes in Edinburgh' 19 September 1925 in Frank G. Novak, Jr (ed) Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence Routledge, London/NY 1995,  p. 341

Mortimer Menpes' image and Dorothy Menpes' description of a Japanese garden

Australian artist Mortimer Menpes visited Japan in the late 1880s, and his daughter Dorothy published a memoir of time spent there in a volume attributed to Menpes pere and published in 1901.

I would not at this point posit any direct connection between the internal reserves of early 20th century Britain, the US or Australia to a Japanese influence (certainly, while the size and location of a Japanese garden as an urban oasis matches, the intended use and aesthetic approaches are entirely different) however I can't help finding Dorothy Menpes' words familiar in the context of later Internal Reserve rhetoric, such as when she describes a vision for a new garden: 'What a garden it would be! There were full-grown trees, stepping-stones, miniature bridges, ponds of goldfish - all... occupying an area the size of a small room. And not only was the garden itself planned out and designed, but it was also arranged to form a pattern in relation to the trees and the houses and the surrounding hills.' Menpes, Japan: A record in colour Adam and Charles Black, London 1901 pp.108-9; image is of an 'Iris garden' facing p. 112

A Street in China

Communal off-street open space adjoining residences, as sketched by Shirley Wood in her 1958 memoir A Street in China (London, Michael Joseph). This diagram appears on page 8, accompanied by a list of 'characters', i.e. the tenants, 31 people in all. Descriptions of the space itself is however limited: p. 14 'After some complicated manooeuvring we... trundled up the lane and around the corner of a bamboo fence into a stony courtyard with our new home before us.' On p. 15, we are told of a similar space adjoining: 'A little back room looked across a thatched shed into the next courtyard, which was a factory processing lard and edible pigskin.'