Heaton Park
Heaton Park is a public park in Prestwich, Bury, Greater Manchester, England, covering an area of over. The park includes the grounds of a Grade I listed, neoclassical 18th century country house, Heaton Hall. The hall, remodelled by James Wyatt in 1772, is now only open to the public on an occasional basis as a museum and events venue. It is the biggest park in Greater Manchester, and also one of the largest municipal parks in Europe.
Heaton Park was sold to Manchester City Council in 1902 by the 5th Earl of Wilton. It has one of the United Kingdom's few concrete towers, the Heaton Park BT Tower.
The park was renovated as part of a millennium project partnership between the Heritage Lottery Fund and Manchester City Council at a cost of over £10 million. It contains an 18-hole golf course, a boating lake, an animal farm, a pitch and putt course, a golf driving range, woodlands, ornamental gardens, an observatory, an adventure playground, a Papal monument and a volunteer-run tram system and museum, and is listed Grade II by Historic England. It has the only flat green bowling greens in Manchester, built for the 2002 Commonwealth Games.
Toponymy
The park takes its name from the local area of Great Heaton. Heaton is derived from Old English heah 'high' + tun 'enclosure' or 'settlement'.History
Heaton Hall had been owned by the Holland family since the Middle Ages. In 1684, when Sir John Egerton, 3rd Baronet of Wilton, married Elizabeth Holland, the hall came to the Egerton family. In 1772, Sir Thomas Egerton, 7th Baronet, commissioned the fashionable architect James Wyatt to design a new home for his young family. Although Wyatt had already established a reputation for himself as an innovative architect, he was only 26 years old and Heaton Hall was his first country house commission. Wyatt's neo-classical masterpiece was built in phases and was mostly completed by 1789.The park was originally laid out by William Emes in the style of Capability Brown. It has long been used for public events such as Heaton Park races, which were established by the second Earl in 1827. The races were run on a course around the park which included the site of the present day boating lake until 1839 when they moved to Aintree near Liverpool, now the venue for the Grand National. During the 19th century when the railway to Bury was being laid, it stopped short of Heaton Park, as Lord Wilton was not prepared to see his estate disfigured by a railway. As a compromise the line was run under the estate in a tunnel and a railway station opened adjacent to the Whittaker Lane/Bury Old Road entrance in 1879. Consequently, the decision by Lord Wilton to put the hall and park up for sale was greeted with dismay, especially when it became known that the site was being eyed by a property developer. A pressure group was formed to persuade Manchester City Council to purchase it as a museum and municipal park. Alderman Fletcher Moss, a prominent antiquarian was a notable influence in this movement. The park was purchased and opened to the public in 1902. Unfortunately, the council was not prepared to purchase the contents of the hall, so the furniture and paintings were sold by auction. The hall was considered by the council to be of little architectural or historical significance and the saloon was initially used as a tea-room.
During the First World War, the park was used as a training camp for the Pals battalions of the Manchester Regiment, whilst Heaton Hall became a military hospital.
In the Second World War, the park was a camp for the Royal Air Force, where 133,516 aircrew were trained. The park was home to a barrage balloon anchorage and an ackack emplacement. Two "prefab" housing estates and an infants school were built in the south of the park, the houses providing much-needed homes until they were demolished in the 1960s. The school building was used by Manchester City Council until 2012, when it was demolished.
Heaton Hall
The hall has been a Grade I Listed Building since 1952 and has been called "the finest house of its period in Lancashire". It is built of sandstone and stuccoed brick, in a traditional Palladian design with the entrance on the north side and the facade on the south. The landscaping was designed to make the most of the uninterrupted views of the rolling hills across to the Pennines. A feature of this was the ha-ha, used to keep the grazing animals, so important to the landscaping, away from the formal lawns, with a barrier that was all-but invisible from the house.The state rooms include the Library, the Music Room, Dining Room and upstairs, a rather rare Etruscan Room. The rooms of the hall were exquisitely finished by the finest artists and craftsmen of the period, with most of the furnishings and mahogany doors being made by Gillow's of Lancashire. Most of the decorative paintings, the Pompeiian Cupola Room and the case for the 18th century chamber organ built by Samuel Green in 1790, were the work of Italian artist, Biagio Rebecca. The organ fills one wall of the Music Room. The ornate plasterwork was created by the firm of Joseph Rose II of York.
There are 13 rooms occasionally open to the public in the central core and east wing. Manchester City Galleries restored the decorative detail in the 1980s and early 1990s. The ground floor rooms on the north east front have been converted to an expansive space that houses temporary exhibitions. The first floor rooms include the Cupola which was originally Lady Egerton's dressing room. The room was styled in the 1770s "Pompeiian" style with mirrored walls and a domed ceiling — there are only three such rooms left in Britain.
The library was remodelled by Lewis Wyatt in the 1820s. Heaton Hall's collections are managed by Manchester Galleries. The hall is currently listed on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register.