John Hall wants to build a legacy

[Happy Face 29]

Imagine you are Sir John Hall, miner’s son turned millionaire property developer.

 

Like many great men in the autumn of their careers, the creator of Europe’s largest shopping mall at the Gateshead MetroCentre and saviour of one of Britain’s biggest football brands at Newcastle United, you want to leave a legacy.

 

So what does the businessman create to preserve his memory? An iconic new building on Tyneside? A state-of-the-art sports facility? Or more altruistically, an endowment at a North East university?

 

No, the man who founded his fortune on turning a power-station ash dump into a retail revolution, who was knighted in 1991 for his part in the north-east’s economic regeneration, wants a rose garden.

 

But typically for Sir John, it’s not just any old garden. It’s a very different, £2.5 million spectacular of terraces, pavilions and water across four acres and filled with the world’s largest collection of roses, upwards of 10,000, many of them rare and exotic.

 

Why this horticultural extravaganza rather than something more in keeping with his achievements?

 

The answer is twofold. First, Sir John, now 77, has finally revealed a love of roses from his earliest days. Born in the Northumberland pit village of Ashington, where everyone followed the traditional enthusiasms of growing leeks for competition and veg for the table, he was different.

 

“I just loved flowers,” he recalls. “I was still at school when I grew my first rose, a present from my father. I don’t remember the variety now, but I know it was pink and had a wonderful perfume.”

 

As a teenager at the end of the Second World War he grew the new 'Peace’ rose named to mark victory in Europe and he tried grafting plants on to hardy root stocks. “I delighted in making that little T-cut in the bark and then shaping the stem to fit inside, before binding it up with raffia,” he says.

 

“Mind, I was not always successful.”

 

But growing a career took him from his rose beds into the bear garden of big business. “There was just not enough time for it. I was working 12-14 hours a day, six, seven days a week. There was no space for gardening.”

 

Now fast-forward 60 years to find the second reason for Sir John’s rose garden.

 

Today he lives in sumptuous elegance in the Grade II listed Wynyard Hall, a grand Palladian house described by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, architectural historian, as the most splendid 19th-century mansion in the country.

 

Divested of his football and property empire – but by no means retired – he is restoring the house near Stockton-on-Tees as a four-star country house hotel. Built in the 1820s for the flamboyant 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, Wynyard cost the equivalent of £11 million at today’s prices.

 

The house was the haunt of Britain’s great and good, The Duke of Wellington was a frequent guest, as was Dickens. Disraeli loved Wynyard, too. It was also a notorious trysting place for Edward VII and his mistress Alice Keppel, the maternal grandmother of the present Duchess of Cornwall. Once asked why he spent so much time there, the king allegedly replied: “At Wynyard I can live the life of a gentleman, having as much rumpty-tumpty as I wish and no one gives a damn.”

 

However, when Sir John bought it in 1987 the great house was in decline and he knew that the only way to preserve it was to make it work for its keep.

 

Almost half the 5,000-acre estate was sold. Part became the 900-home upmarket village of Wynyard, where for a time Newcastle United’s manager Kevin Keegan lived, and the remainder was turned into a business park.

 

Two years ago he was granted permission to convert the house into a luxury hotel with golf course, and today there are plans for more bedrooms, another golf course, a semi-permanent marquee for weddings and conferences, plus more than doubling the size of Wynyard village.

 

But Sir John sees his roses in Wynyard’s old walled garden as the feature that will attract 50,000 visitors a year and help support Wynyard Hall for future generations.

 

“I want it to be a garden of my time,” he says. “I have spent millions restoring this place. It was worthwhile, but it was simply putting back what the Victorians had done.

 

''This will be something I have created. It will be a legacy for the North East from me and my wife, Mae. People will come from all over the world to visit these gardens,” he says.

 

There was a brief hiatus last year when Sir John was diagnosed with cancer, but his doctors have since told him medication will keep it in check until long after phase one of the garden is completed next year.

 

The design is by Simon Dorrell, famed for his Arts and Crafts-style gardens at his home, Bryan’s Ground, near Presteigne on the Welsh Borders, and Hampton Court in Herefordshire.

 

“It’s brilliant,” says Sir John. “It has everything I could have wanted. I fell in love with it immediately I saw Simon’s drawings.” The two had never heard of each other before meeting in autumn 2009 on the recommendation of Michael Marriott, technical director of David Austin Roses, who will source all the plants.

 

“When I first arrived at Wynyard I think I was probably the only person who didn’t know who he was,” says Simon, 48. “I have never been to the North East in my life. He never asked me what I had done previously or asked to see any examples of my work.

 

“My brief was so simple: 'Make me a garden and I want roses in it’. Either by luck or skill I have come up with something that has utterly enchanted him,” Simon says.

 

“What he won’t be getting is a lot of concrete, steel and prairie-planting. You have a lot of structure from me, a lot of trees, a lot of water and a lot of very consciously designed spaces with a lot of important planting within them.”

 

He has devised a series of rooms with varied themes from a moated island with a secret rose garden to a block of tunnels, 'Rose Mesquita’ on the plan, inspired by the Moorish double arches of the ancient Mesquita mosque at Cordoba in Spain.

 

“The whole concept is that you are drowning in rose petals, there are roses everywhere, climbing out of trees, over tunnels, you can’t avoid them, they are almost smothering everything.

 

“I do think it’s telling – perhaps because of his age and his illness – that he wants a garden as his legacy and not a shopping mall or a new stand at St James’s Park,” he says.

 

“Maybe it’s because – underneath that very tough exterior – there’s an old softie hiding inside.”

 

Source

 

Sorry

[manc-mag 1]

Can't believe he's only 77. Or more incredulously yet, that he was still in his 50's in that photo with Keegan and the criminal neck ties...

[TheMoog 0]

He turned out to be a bit of a knob in his choice of who he sold up to but those days in the 90s were fucking awesome

[Barney 0]

What a homo.

[Kitman 2188]

I couldn't give a stuff about him or his stupid garden tbh.

[Kevin 1]

I didn't read that shite but to sum it up he wants a garden?

[Kitman 2188]

I didn't read that shite but to sum it up he wants a garden?

 

Yup. A rose garden. Bet you're excited about that, huh?

[Kevin 1]

Buzzing.

[plausibledenial 0]

Never mind a fuckin stupid garden ..if he wants to be remembered ...then buy the fucking club back off the FCB Ashley !

[Happy Face 29]

I didn't read that shite but to sum it up he wants a garden?

 

Sorry

[snakehips 0]

That piece is just an advert to attract folk to his hotel etc.

[spongebob toonpants 3598]

His future is looking rosy

 

 

 

 

 

I'll get my coat

[Isegrim 8870]

Hmm, planning gardening