For the first time in Southend-on-Sea and following application to Historic England by Milton Society, a garden has been Listed. The historic Shrubbery gardens beside Pier Hill, site of the historic and magical Never Never Land, are now listed after assessment by Historic England. Listed status has also been granted to the 1930s sun shelter that sits below the Westcliff Hotel.
However, application for the wider cliff gardens dating from the Victorian period and extending up to the Cliffs Pavilion, was refused designation after a flawed assessment and then appeal by Milton Society. Incorrectly, Historic England included the large landslip area which was bound to negatively influence consideration of the remaining, intact gardens. On appeal and unsurprisingly, the original decision was upheld, even with the land slip area excluded from consideration.
Whilst is is great to see the Listing recognition, which we hope will help to protect the Shrubbery gardens, application for the same gardens was refused by Historic England as recently as 2023. A further application by us was submitted in 2024 and this led to their re-opening of the file in early 2025. This application also had the significant support of the Essex Garden Trust. The resultant Listing is very welcome but Historic England’s errors and the reversal of part of their decision rather cast doubt on their Listing process. It suggests that something more than historic significance is at play and this should result in further review.
But we can take pleasure in knowing that all our documented efforts were, at least in part, successful and now Southend has it’s first Listed gardens which should help with future protection and funding bids.
We will now push the Council for the whole of the cliff gardens to become a conservation area as we are still very concerned about the poor condition of these historic gardens and have maintained our campaign to ‘Save Our Cliff Gardens’ which you can support here https://www.change.org/p/save-our-cliffs-in-southend-on-sea?source_location=search