Kew - the Suffragettes

The last time we visited Kew Gardens was a long time ago. Our son Theo was in a pushchair, and as he’s about to ship out to California to work as a creative manager, you can tell that is a lo-o-o-ng time.

When I went to Kew for the very first time in the early 1980s it was 10p to get in. My memory serves me badly, but I think at the Lion Gate (AKA The London Welsh gate) there was a simple turnstile arrangement where you put in a coin and went through the barrier. These days it’ll cost you £15 for a stroll past the Pagoda or a jostle with Japanese tourists in the Palm House.

The glory of the turnstile arrangement is that it didn’t ask you: “would you like to make a £1.50 voluntary donation to Kew Gardens trust” as well.

Fair enough, back in the early 1980s there was far less to see than today. But you didn’t have people dressed up as though they were extras in a low-budget Jane Austen adaptation: “Surely miss Brittney, the latest London fashions are not still beige and cream.” Likewise there was no-one to ask you to make a voluntary donation the moment you stepped through the door of any large building. Our visit to Kew was like an exercise in avoiding Georgian panhandlers.

And inadvertently stepping on the autumn-flowering crocus.

I had never really been aware of the autumn-flowering crocus but the Avon Bulbs website informs me that it was most likely Crocus speciosus that lined some of the long pathways of the gardens. One of many positive reasons for visiting Kew in September.

The reason we had come to Kew in the first place was to try and find the original site of an image I had stumbled across in the Library of Congress archives. It was a black and white news photo from 1913 of a smouldering Kew Gardens tea-house that was burned down by suffragettes. How Edwardian a protest is that? Forget storming the seats of power, stopping the major arteries of transport, or interfering with the mighty levers of finance in Threadneedle Street. Let’s burn down a teahouse in a well-known ornamental garden!

Where was this former purveyor of Darjeeling and warm muffins that had been burned to a crisp? The photo, as you can see, has one great big clue – and that is the position of the Pagoda beyond the building, along with what looks like a cedar tree to its right. My full-time profession is working on Then and Now books and the trick in locating the site of old photo (if you don’t have an address to work from) is to triangulate back from two known elements.

When there is major building work, although grand former structures will get razed entirely, often the road infrastructure remains the same. New buildings more often than not are put on the footprint of the old.

We made our way to the Pavilion Restaurant which is just a fir cone’s throw from the top of the Pagoda (were it open in 2015… though if it were open it would have probably been stuffed with the Miss Bingleys asking if you’d like to make a voluntary donation) and found a building that looked like it had been built just around 1914. Beyond was the Pagoda, and, very satisfyingly, to the right was a cedar tree that looked 100 years bigger. You can just see a branch of it poking out halfway up.

The exact match wasn’t quite gettable because of the growth of trees around the more recent teahouse - a perennial hazard when trying to recreate old photos - but it was ‘close enough for jazz’.

My co-photographer on the project, Juliette, gets so frustrated by the growth of trees in front of historic images she has to photograph, she’s threatened to go round London with a chainsaw in her bicycle basket. That’s the beauty of being French you see, direct action comes so naturally to them. We just burn down teahouses. Which is direct action, yes, but a very British sort of direct action.