Italian Gardens, Scarborough

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Scope & content: Sepia-tinted photographic postcard showing a view of the Italian Gardens, Scarborough. Pencil: [personal message] [address in Huddersfield supplied]. The complex of Valley Gardens, Italian Gardens, South Cliff Gardens, and Holbeck Gardens, now one continuous landscape, was begun in the 1850s, when Sir Joseph Paxton built a grand hall, promenade, balustraded steps and Italianate gardens for the Scarborough Spa. William Skipsey, the head gardener to the Spa, continued the works, laying out the People's Park (later renamed Valley Gardens) in 1862, to which was added an iron bridge presented by Robert Williamson, which had collapsed on the river Ouse. In 1874, the first cliff tramway in Britain was added, and two years later Paxton's grand hall burned down, to be replaced by a new building by Verity and Hunt. In 1880 Skipsey laid out the Holbeck Gardens (much damaged when the Holbeck Hall Hotel collapsed into them in 1993). Harry W. Smith, the borough engineer, laid out the South Cliff Gardens c.1910. The rose garden was developed from the 1880s by Lord Beeforth, and purchased by the Corporation in 1912; it was not until 1957 that the Corporation completed the acquisition of all the areas of garden that had been developed