By the late eighteenth century, the area outside Canterbury’s southern walls that had once been the seat of the Hales family and before them the Chiche family, that had housed a medieval manor and given its name to a donjon and its corrupted successors, had become something rather less distinguished: a rough common field, largely neglected, traversed by a meandering path and bounded by the ancient earthen bank of the city’s Roman and medieval fortifications. The mound at its center still rose to a commanding height, but the land around it was waste ground in the plain sense of the term.
The man who changed that was James Simmons.
James Simmons was born in Canterbury in 1741 and spent his life building institutions in the city. He was a newspaper proprietor, owning and operating the Kentish Gazette, one of the county’s leading papers. He was a miller and a merchant. Most consequentially, he was a banker: with his partner Henry Gipp, he founded the Canterbury Bank in 1788, an institution that survived through multiple acquisitions and eventually became part of Lloyds Bank, whose Canterbury branch today occupies a site with a lineage traceable to Simmons’s original venture.
He was equally active in public life. Elected Alderman for Riding Gate Ward in 1774, he served as Mayor of Canterbury twice, in 1776 and again in 1778. As Treasurer of the newly formed Canterbury Pavement Commissioners between 1787 and 1791, he played a central role in modernizing the city’s streets and infrastructure, the kind of civic work that gets done by people who care more about the functioning of a place than about their own prominence. He was also involved in the construction of the new market outside the Christchurch gates in 1790, which became the Buttermarket. By any measure, he was a man of considerable energy and civic seriousness.
In 1790, Simmons took a lease on the Dane John from the Mayor and Commonalty of Canterbury at nominal rent, on the understanding that he would level the land and lay out gardens there at his own expense. The agreement gave the public rights of access for walking, games, and sports. What Simmons undertook was not minor landscaping. He was proposing to transform rough pasture around an ancient mound into a pleasure garden suitable for the citizens of a cathedral city.
The project ran dramatically over budget. The original estimate was £450. By the time the principal improvements were complete in 1793, the cost had reached £1,500. What that money bought was substantial: the mound itself was relandscaped and raised by approximately four metres, giving it the profile it retains today. A winding terrace walk was established around and up its slopes. The meandering cross-path that had cut across the ground was converted into a formal avenue. Ornamental plantings were made throughout. The rough field became a park.
The inscription on the monument erected to his memory in 1803 by public subscription records the transaction plainly: This field and hill were improved, and these terraces, walks and plantations, made in the year 1790, for the use of the public, at the sole expense of James Simmons, Esq., of this city, Alderman and Banker. To perpetuate the memory of which generous transaction, and as a mark of gratitude for his other public services, this pillar was erected by voluntary subscription in the year 1803.
The pillar stands on top of the mound today, as it has for more than two centuries.
The story of Simmons and the Dane John did not end cleanly. In 1796, a dispute arose with the Guardians of the Poor over the rate to be paid for the land, and Simmons handed the Dane John back to the Mayor and Commonalty. The city, apparently not fully prepared to manage what he had created, allowed the gardens to decline. It was not until 1803 that the Burghmote formed a committee to take the site properly in hand, and not until 1836 that the newly constituted Canterbury Council assumed permanent oversight.
That the monument to Simmons was erected precisely in 1803, the year the city finally got serious about managing the gardens he had created and returned at cost to himself, seems fitting. It was public acknowledgment of what he had done, arriving a little late.
The story of Dane John Gardens in the nineteenth century is often attributed wholesale to Simmons, but the Victorian improvements that gave the gardens much of their current character came from a separate hand. Around 1840, William Masters, a Canterbury nurseryman and landscape gardener who owned Masters’ Exotic Nursery, was involved in further work on the site. His contributions built on Simmons’s foundation rather than replacing it, and the design credit has sometimes been attributed to him when properly it belongs to both: Simmons for the conception and initial execution, Masters for the Victorian refinements that followed.
The bandstand, the ornamental fountain, and several of the sculptural elements that now define the gardens as a Victorian public space came in this later period, reflecting the era’s enthusiasm for civic improvement and public recreation. By the middle of the nineteenth century, what Simmons had begun in 1790 had become something he might not have fully anticipated: one of the most pleasant green spaces in a cathedral city, drawing residents and visitors in numbers.
James Simmons died in 1807. The Canterbury Bank he founded outlasted him by nearly a century before its eventual absorption into the national banking system. The Kentish Gazette continued. The streets he helped pave remain. And the park he created out of rough ground, at his own expense, overbudget, only to hand it back after a bureaucratic argument about rates, remains the centerpiece of Canterbury’s southern public space.
The mound at its center, which Simmons raised and shaped and gave a winding path, is the same mound that Godfrey-Faussett argued was Celtic in origin, possibly predating the Romans, certainly predating the Normans who briefly used it as a motte. Simmons knew none of that archaeology. He saw rough ground that could be made useful and beautiful for the people of his city, and he made it so.