St John's is a small town villa with a complex building history (no.11 Glendower St). The two-storey front on Glendower Street appears older (? eighteenth-century) than the three-storey block at the rear, which appears early nineteenth-century in date. At its rear, a three-storey block with Coalbrookdale verandah, of a type advertsied between 1840 and 1872. It overlooks the rare survival of a small Victorian town garden with its early twentieth-century addition of a tennis court.

The garden lies to the south of the house, between it and the public park of Chippenham. It is small and rectangular, bounded on the east and west by high brick walls and, on the south, by a low stone wall with a doorway in the middle giving access to the public park of Chippenham. Apart from the levelling for a lawn tennis court, the walls and internal layout appear to be early to mid nineteenth century in date and may well be contemporary with the verandah. The ground slopes gently to the south, and has been carefully graded, the part nearest the house being steeper than the outer part. The wider southern end is largely taken up with a former lawn tennis court, now lawn, made in 1913 to 1914. The garden is laid out largely to lawn, with wall borders, side paths and a small square pool just above the former tennis court.

A kitchen garden once lay to the east of the garden, but this was separately sold in the 1920s and is now built on.

Source:
Cadw 1994: Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales, Gwent, 100-1 (ref: PGW(Gt)47).

RCAHMW, 28 June 2022