03 Apr 2023
Over the last few weeks the future of another beloved St Albans landmark has been put at risk after Café Rouge closed on Holywell Hill. Sue Mann asks what will happen now to this iconic building?
St Albans is probably unique in having a Grade II listed Art Deco style former horticultural exhibition hall located on one of its busiest streets. At the opening of the hall on Holywell Hill in May 1931, the building was described as a ’Crystal Palace in miniature’. It looked then and still looks today like a very rich man’s rather grand conservatory, which indeed it was.
The rich man in question was Samuel Ryder – now more famous for golf’s Ryder Cup – who came to St Albans with his family in around 1897. He learned his trade from his father, also called Samuel, who ran a nursery and market garden in Sale, near Manchester. Samuel junior chose St Albans because of its rail connections (three stations at that time) because his business plan was to capture a mass market for garden seeds sold through mail order for just a penny a packet.
Starting the business from a garden shed in a rented house on Folly Lane, in less than six years Ryder was successful enough to be able to purchase an acre of land and buildings fronting onto Holywell Hill. The business of Ryder and Son continued to grow on the back of those penny packets of seeds sold in their millions. The business went public some years later to become Samuel Ryder and Son (1920) Ltd.
Ryder based a great deal of his success on the power of advertising. From the outset he advertised his penny packets of seeds in the gardening and national press, including the Daily Mail and later the Sunday Times. He wasn’t the first to sell seeds by mail order but the first to target a mass market, the working man who could afford to spare only a penny or two at a time when the average labouring wage was a pound or two a week.
The choice was huge and the number of seeds in a packet depended on the rarity value. ‘All kinds of seed from orchids to mustard and cress in penny packets’, that was the Ryder marketing slogan in the early days. Rare strains, previously only affordable to the more affluent gardener, could now be purchased, albeit in small quantities, by even the most impoverished gardener.
Ryder’s new venture in 1931 aimed to revive interest in gardening in the post-war period – a time of rising unemployment and world-wide economic depression following the New York stock market crash of 1929.
At a lunch held at St Albans Town Hall to celebrate the opening of the hall on 7 May 1931, Ryder said that gardening at present needed all the help it could get because it was not so popular as it had been 20 years before.
“A working man in the old days would buy his vegetable seeds and, as a luxury, buy quite a number of flower seeds, and grow quite a number of flower subjects. He did not do so now, because he could not afford to do so. The large gardens connected with our mansions, which were so glorious in the old days, were passing away, the heavy burden of taxation making their upkeep impossible.
“Gardening was now more expensive, everything cost more after the War, and it was sad to note the economies that had to be exercised by the great masses of the people.”
Ryder himself had moved from Folly Lane to a more substantial house in Gombards and, by 1907, the family could afford to move to a modest-sized mansion of their own, Marlborough House (now part of Loreto College), with extensive gardens.
Ryder lived there with his wife and three daughters until 1924 when the family moved to a more modest house in Clarence Road, so perhaps his statement about the ‘heavy burden of taxation’ was quite heartfelt.
As the Herts Advertiser reported (8.5.1931), Ryder also put this waning interest in horticulture down to the attractions of motoring, picture palaces and popular sports, which caused “countless thousands to neglect their gardens”.
Ironically, he himself had done much to popularise and promote the sport of golf through the Ryder Cup, introduced in 1927, and competed for by players from the Professional Golfers Associations of the USA and Britain.
Just days before the opening of the new exhibition hall, Ryder had attended Fulwell Golf Club, Twickenham, where a trial match was played to select the 1931 Ryder Cup team.
Standing on the lawn, surrounded by the players, Ryder spoke for the ‘talkies’ saying that it was “a great honour to address that audience of ardent golfers and a greater honour when he knew that he was addressing countless thousands of people in various picture houses throughout the world”.
It was claimed that 40,000 people visited the Ryder exhibition hall in St Albans in its first year of opening and it continued to display the firm’s products for many years.
Samuel Ryder died in 1936. His younger daughter Joan became a director and later managing director and chairman of the business. In 1961, Ryder’s was taken over by rivals, Cuthberts.
Just three years later the Holywell Hill site was acquired by St Albans City Council for £110,000 and leased to the Post Office.
In 1992 the Post Office relocated and the buildings were boarded up. Various development schemes were put forward, from replacing the buildings with a multi-storey car park to building an office block.
Eventually, the council ran a competition with the winning architect Anthony Monk putting forward a scheme for a mix of housing, a hotel and restaurant. The Pelican Group – part of Whitbread, which ran the Café Rouge chain at that time – leased the former exhibition hall to convert it into a bistro style restaurant. Much controversy surrounded the various development proposals for the site, and it wasn’t until the late 1990s that work was completed and the café opened.
St Albans architect Percival C. Blow designed the exhibition hall, which was built by C. Miskin and Sons. Blow and Christopher Miskin were both present at the lunch in the Town Hall in May 1931.
Samuel Ryder paid tribute to them, saying that the exhibition hall – with its rendered brick and reinforced concrete walls and glazed roof with semi-circular gable ends and small central dome, classical details and Art Deco style windows – was a monument to them.
Sue Mann is a member of St Albans and Hertfordshire Architectural and Archaeological Society (SAHAAS). The Society has commenced formulating a St Albans and District Heritage at Risk Register.
