More History and Heritage.....

1841-1885: The flowering of Kew

Decimus Burton

William Andrews Nesfield

The Orangery

Palm House

Kew Today.....

The Broad Walk

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The Broad Walk

The Broad Walk was laid out by Decimus Burton in 1845-1846 as part of his entrance design for the new Royal Botanic Gardens.

This grand promenade brought the visitor from the end of the Little Broad Walk in a straight line through to the Palm House Pond. William Nesfield designed an elaborate series of symmetrical flower beds and plantings along its length, forming an avenue of deodar cedars and regular crescent shaped plots.

It seems that the original intention for the Broad Walk plantings was to have taxonomic groupings of trees in parallel lines on either side. However, in 1856, because Sir Benjamin Hall, who was the new First Commissioner for Metropolitan Improvement, insisted on greater numbers of much more floral displays, the Broad Walk received the Victorian promenade style of bedding with both the shape of the beds and the choice of flowers exactly the same on each side.

These flower beds were used to grow cabbages, lettuces and root vegetables during the First World War. The plantings were reduced in complexity where the Broad Walk squeezed past the boundary to the Royal grounds and the Royal Mews and, on the 1st edition Ordnance Survey (1861-71) appear to be as Nesfield designed them, with a repeated design of horseshoe shaped beds of varying sizes, straight beds and a line of trees. The 2nd edition (1891-96) shows this design further simplified and the 3rd edition (1910) shows them as a series of single vestigial horseshoe shapes.

The construction of Burton's Broad Walk involved a major reorganisation of the landscape in its vicinity. It reduced the size of the Palace Stables; ran across the Great Lawn, reducing its extent; and shortened the sunken fence separating the Palace Grounds from the Pleasure Grounds and Botanic Gardens.

A linear scattering of mature trees, remnants of the original Great Lawn plantings from the mid 18th century, were also removed to make way for the new promenade. The construction of the walk also involved levelling the ground along its entire length and the spoil created from this was used to create the Crab Mound near the Palm House.

In the midst of all this change, it was decided that an old Turkey Oak, standing halfway along one side of the Broad Walk, should be retained. To make this happen, a horseshoe shaped path was placed around the tree and a correspondingly shaped path created on the other side of the Walk to retain the symmetry. These horseshoe shaped paths connected in turn to other paths extending into the old Botanic Gardens to the east and to a gate into the Pleasure Grounds to the west.

The original surface treatment of the Broad Walk is not currently known, though it would probably have been gravelled. No documentation has yet been found to show if it was Burton's intent for the Campanile to be a visual terminus for the Broad Walk, but an 1851 map shows a dotted line extending across the Palm House Pond to the Campanile, indicating that the view was a recognised feature.

After Donald Beaton, a regular contributor to the "Gardener's Chronicle" in the 1850s/1860s, criticised the plain circle of grass in the circular bed at the Pond end of the Broad Walk, it was replaced in 1862 by a raised bed planted in panels of geraniums and verbenas and prominently capped with a large flower vase.

An 1870 illustration from the "Gardener's Chronicle" shows the circular bed to be kerbed and its centre several feet high, covered in carpet bedding and topped by a bowl raised on dolphins. Although the current bowl at the centre of the bed is of a similar shape to that shown in the picture, it is not supported by dolphins. Two vases held in store at Kew, although being less of a bowl shape than that depicted in the "Gardeners' Chronicle" are in fact raised on dolphins that do match the picture, so it is probably one of these vases that sat in the centre of the circular bed in 1870.

Decimus Burton's 1845 design for the Broad Walk is a fundamental component of the 19th century landscape design for the gardens. It is a major axial route within the Gardens which also guides the gaze of the visitor along its length from Palm House Pond the the Orangery.

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