Chapter 11: From 1992 to the Present Day

1999 saw the construction of the rear bathroom, with ancillary work to the adjacent part of the house. The evidence that this brought to light about the stages of construction of the rear of the house in its early years has already been recorded (see chapter 4). Both in the bathroom and in the adjacent room there was a lot of decayed plasterwork which was done away with and replaced by modern plasterboard. In the bathroom itself we installed a bath which had been awaiting use since the original rehabilitation of the house, together with other fittings, including a shower, from Hastings Bathrooms. Beyond this, the main feature was the construction of a partition with high level lights separating the bathroom itself from the passage leading from the staircase to the corner room, constructed by Woodbase while the operation was in progress. The resulting passage was painted in a rich, dark pink colour inspired by Raby Castle, Co. Durham, which I must have visited shortly before, as a gallery for hanging watercolours.

Corridor by rear bathroom

2000 and the early part of 2001 were mainly notable for work in the garden. I had long come to feel that the front garden was a bit scruffy, dominated by grass and weeds (apart from the well-established roses at either end, which I think I was once told were grafted on a wild rose stock): I remember feeling that people who came down the steps from the West Hill and paused by the garden before going down the hill deserved something better. I therefore commissioned a local gardening expert, Stephanie Donaldson, to draw up a plan for the garden, which she duly did, and its execution was placed in the hands of Emma Cochrane, a young gardening enthusiast who subsequently worked for me for many years and was a real tower of strength, until she moved to Liverpool in 2022. Stephanie designed an attractive combination of low plants and shrubs of a purplish-red hue, which looked immaculate, and which provided the smart appearance that seemed appropriate at the front. As for the rear garden, however, she felt that the combined effect of the predominant shadiness of the area and the underground asphalt (see above) meant that no elaborate planting plan would work: we therefore resolved to leave the large shrubs that were there, putting down a membrane and bark chips around them and having a smaller area of grass towards the front of the garden.