Marjory Allen, Lady Allen of Hurtwood, was an innovative garden designer, a pioneering landscape architect, and a tireless campaigner for child welfare. She was instrumental in the creation of adventure playgrounds in the UK. Number 22 Lawrence Street, Chelsea, which bears her plaque, is the home where she lived and advocated for local children to have accessible spaces to play.

Early life

Marjory Gill was born in Bexleyheath on 10 May 1897, to George Gill, a rate collector for Kent Waterworks Company who came from a family of Nonconformist ministers, and Sarah (Sala) Shoreys Gill (née Driver), who worked in the civil service. Her family of seven chose to live without servants and spent their holidays camping. When the family moved to rural Kent, Marjory enjoyed a country life of haymaking, milking cows, and growing flowers and vegetables.

Marjory went to Bedales school in 1910, where she thrived and made her first experiments in garden design. She planned and planted a herbaceous border there, taking inspiration from the horticulturalist and garden designer Gertrude Jekyll.

Gardening education

Marjory spent a year learning practical horticulture in the gardens at Aldenham House in Elstree, which was maintained by the head gardener and a wartime team of land girls and village lads. She then took a diploma in Horticulture at the University of Reading, which she passed in 1920.

In 1921, Marjory joined her brother in Rome, where she studied the gardens. She also met Clifford Allen, a leading member of the Independent Labour Party. The couple were married in December at Chelsea Town Hall. Their daughter Joan (Polly) Allen was born in 1922.

Garden design

By 1926 Allen had been made a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society. In addition to designing gardens, she wrote regular gardening articles for the Manchester Guardian and in 1934 became a contributor to its long-running ‘Country Diary’ column.

In 1928, Allen persuaded Harry Gordon Selfridge to let her redesign the gardens above the recently extended Selfridges store. Reputedly, this was the world’s largest roof garden at that time, and was enjoyed by 35,000 people a week. Allen also created London balcony gardens for BBC Broadcasting House in Portland Place (1932) and for Peter Jones in Sloane Square (1936), and a roof garden for St Christopher’s Nursery in Somers Town (1934).

On 25 March 1930, Allen was elected the first Fellow of the new Institute of Landscape Architects. She was made vice president in 1937.

Family changes

Allen became Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood when her husband, Clifford, was made a peer in 1932. Hurtwood was the house that the Allens commissioned in the Surrey hills and for which she created the garden.

Clifford died in March 1939. At the beginning of the war, Marjory designed a garden for HG Wells at the house bearing his plaque near Regent’s Park, but spent much more time at Hurtwood with Polly, family and friends at this time.

Evacuees and nurseries

While working in Somers Town, Allen had become involved with the nursery movement. She called for coordination of planning between housebuilders, school providers and town planners, to provide nursery schools, playgrounds and personal gardens.

By 1940, Allen sat on the executive committee of the Nursery School Association (NSA), of which she later became chair. She and the NSA campaigned for evacuee needs and for nursery centres and trained staff. Allen and architect Judith Ledeboer designed the first prefabricated nursery in Britain in 1941. Within a year there were 200 nurseries on their model.

Campaigning for children

Allen campaigned for improvements in child welfare more broadly too. She gathered hundreds of statements from those with experience of the care system in Whose Children? (1945) and was a witness on the Curtis Committee, which led to the passing of the Children Act in 1948.

With Alva Myrdal she created the World Council for Early Childhood Education (known as OMEP from the organisation’s French title). Allen headed the organisation in 1949 until she began work for UNICEF, advising European governments on child welfare. She returned to OMEP in the summer of 1950.

Adventure playgrounds

On a British Council lecture tour, Allen fell in love with Carl Theodor Sørensen’s playground for a housing estate at Emdrup outside Copenhagen. She published her impressions in Picture Post in 1946.

Allen helped create the Clydesdale Road ‘waste material’ bombsite playground in Notting Hill, which opened in 1952. Allen and colleagues from the National Playing Fields Association (NPFA) set up a playground at Lollard Street, Lambeth, in 1954, which was insured by Lloyds to answer criticism that it was dangerous to let children dig, build, carve, make fires and dam streams. Allen’s mantra, ‘better a broken bone than a broken spirit’, embraced all children.

Allen and the town planner Sir George Pepler, who was also involved with the NPFA, coined the term ‘Adventure Playgrounds’ to describe these spaces and under her chairing, the London Adventure Playgrounds Association (LAPA) created 61 adventure playgrounds in the capital.

Writings

Allen sold Hurtwood in 1950 and returned to writing about gardens. Her pamphlets Design for Play (1961) and New Playgrounds (1964) and book Planning for Play (1968) went into multiple editions.

Allen’s Memoirs of an Uneducated Lady (1975), written with her friend Mary Nicholson, ends on the line ‘The work I have chosen to do is never finished’ and she was characteristically busy until nearly the end. She died at home, aged 78, on 11 April 1976.

Location of plaque

Marjory Allen’s blue plaque is at 22 Lawrence Street, a pretty, late Georgian terraced cottage with a garden near the river Thames in Chelsea. She lived here with her daughter Polly from 1958 until early 1966, when they moved to her final home nearby in Brompton.

Allen campagined in particular for accessible playgrounds that could be used by those who were physically disabled or had special educational needs. While resident in Chelsea, Allen was a vocal advocate for children locally. She wrote regularly to The Times about children in London and provision for play, and campaigned hard for the borough to provide safe children’s playgrounds.

After years of site searching, Chelsea Adventure Playground for disabled children was opened in 1970 in the garden of the Rectory, Old Church Street. Very soon 500 children came to play every week. With an earth-shifter (which Allen is seen driving in a Central Office of Information film of 1971), hills and ponds were created, up, down and into which the children clambered or were winched, while others cooked in the wheelchair-accessible cabin. The Chelsea Adventure Playground is reputedly London’s largest garden after Buckingham Palace. This location is now private but the work is continued at the Chelsea Playground, Royal Hospital Grounds, by the charity KIDS, and many other playgrounds were created on this model.