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11th Evolving Practice of Ophthalmology Middle East Conference, Dubai World Trade Centre, 7 December 2024.
Last night another dream became a reality for me. Last night something I had been thinking about and working towards took full flight. Last I opened my Evolve Gallery with my business partner Dennis.
Prelude, our opening show and fundraiser featured the amazing work of 15 artists representing 5 countries.
From student artwork from Ryman Arts and Star Prep Academy to emerging and establish artists, this was a great start.
We are located on the 11th floor of the historic REEF building at 1933 S. Broadway in Downtown Los Angeles. Our hours are Monday through Friday 12-5pm
ALL work is for sale
Share, from Fredericton, New Brunswick
© aimeepower
let me know if you want to use it, please don't take!
Tredegar Park, on the western side of Newport in south-east Wales, is the surviving heart of what was once a much larger aristocratic estate belonging to the Morgan family, later Lords Tredegar. Its history reaches far beyond the present country park. The landscape preserves evidence of prehistoric activity, a medieval manorial landscape, a great Tudor and early modern estate, a Restoration garden and park, a later eighteenth-century landscape designed in the naturalistic tradition, and the twentieth-century transformation of a private aristocratic estate into a public park. The present park is only a fragment of the historic landscape, having been progressively divided by roads, housing, industry and other development.
The wider landscape around Tredegar Park has a remarkably long human history. Archaeological evidence records activity from the Neolithic, Iron Age, Roman, medieval and post-medieval periods. The area includes the Neolithic chambered tomb at Gwern-y-Cleppa and the Iron Age hillfort now known as Tredegar Fort. The hillfort occupies a prominent position overlooking the surrounding landscape and later became an intentional feature of the Morgan family's designed landscape. Tredegar Park was therefore not created on an empty landscape. The Morgans incorporated an already historic and archaeologically significant countryside into their estate.
One of the most important predecessors of the present park was Cleppa Park, associated with Gwern-y-Cleppa. This appears to have been a medieval manorial estate and deer park. Its origins may extend back to the fourteenth century. The precise relationship between the medieval park, Gwern-y-Cleppa and the later Tredegar estate remains an area of historical research, although evidence indicates that part of the medieval landscape was eventually absorbed into the Morgan estate. Ruins of a medieval house survive within Gwern-y-Cleppa Wood, while fragments of the old park boundary also remain.
The Morgan family's connection with Tredegar dates from the early fifteenth century. Over succeeding generations they established themselves as one of the great landowning families of south Wales. Their fortunes rested upon land, advantageous marriages, political office and, increasingly, the commercial opportunities created by the industrial development of south-east Wales. Tredegar became their principal seat and the centre from which a remarkably extensive estate was administered. The family claimed descent from Welsh princes, a claim that contributed to the strong sense of Welsh identity and dynastic pride associated with Tredegar.
The earliest Tredegar House was very different from the red-brick mansion seen today. A substantial stone manor house existed by the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and parts of this earlier building survive within the present house, particularly in the south-west wing. The medieval house appears to have been arranged around three courtyards, with substantial halls in its south-west and north-east wings. John Leland, writing in 1540, described Tredegar as a “very faire place of stone”, giving an impression of an already prominent and substantial residence.
The decisive transformation came in the seventeenth century. Sir William Morgan undertook an enormous rebuilding programme beginning in 1664. The work took several years and was substantially complete by about 1672. Rather than simply replacing the medieval house, the new mansion incorporated parts of it into an ambitious Restoration building. Red brick was used on a grand scale, an unusual and fashionable choice in Wales at the time, and the house acquired the elaborate architectural character associated with the reign of Charles II.
The architect remains uncertain, although the house has stylistic similarities with buildings associated with Sir Roger Pratt. The master carpenters Roger and William Hurlbutt of Warwick have also been suggested as possible contributors to the work. Whoever was responsible, the resulting building was an exceptional example of Restoration architecture. The new house established the architectural and social centre around which the later Tredegar landscape would be organised.
The creation of the new house was accompanied by the creation of a new formal park and garden worthy of it. Tredegar Park in its designed form therefore dates principally from the period after about 1664. The landscape was initially organised around the house through strong geometrical lines, formal avenues, enclosed gardens and carefully controlled vistas. The park was divided into areas that had different purposes. The northern part became the principal ornamental landscape, while the lower southern ground was associated more closely with the Home Farm and practical estate management.
By the eighteenth century the park had developed into an enormous landscape of approximately 1,000 acres. A survey made in the later eighteenth century records an impressive network of avenues. An oak avenue extended north-west from the house. A double avenue of walnut trees ran towards the Iron Age hillfort at Tredegar Fort, deliberately incorporating the prehistoric monument into the designed landscape. Another avenue of sweet chestnuts extended from the southern gardens, while subsidiary avenues and tree-lined routes spread through the estate.
The effect was to connect the mansion visually and physically with the surrounding countryside and with prominent historical features. Tredegar Fort was particularly significant in this composition. Rather than treating the ancient hillfort merely as an archaeological relic, the eighteenth-century landscape used it as a visual destination. The great avenue approaching it from Tredegar House made the ancient monument part of the aesthetic experience of the estate.
The formal character of the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century landscape was substantially altered from the 1790s. Adam Mickle, a landscape designer associated with the naturalistic school that had developed under designers such as Capability Brown, was employed to reorganise the grounds. Mickle's work transformed the relationship between the house and park. Many of the straight avenues were removed, the landscape became less rigidly geometric, and a large sinuous lake known as the Great Pool was created to the north of the house.
The work reflected the changing taste of the British landed elite, who increasingly preferred apparently natural landscapes of winding drives, irregular planting, open lawns and water rather than the formal avenues and geometric layouts of the earlier period. Tredegar therefore provides an unusually clear example of the transition from the formal garden tradition of the Restoration period towards the picturesque landscape style of the later eighteenth century.
The Great Pool remains one of the most recognisable features of Tredegar's historic landscape. Its winding form contrasts deliberately with the earlier formal geometry of the park. Later nineteenth-century planting around the lake included Wellingtonias and rhododendrons, giving the landscape another layer of development. The lake consequently represents not only an eighteenth-century design intervention but also the continuing evolution of the grounds during the Victorian period.
The late eighteenth century was also a period of extraordinary expansion in the Morgan family's wealth and influence. The male line of the original Morgan family ended with John Morgan, who died without children in 1792. His inheritance passed through his sister Jane and her husband Sir Charles Gould, who adopted the Morgan name. By this period the Tredegar estate extended across more than 40,000 acres in Monmouthshire, Breconshire and Glamorgan.
The Morgans recognised the industrial potential of their land, particularly its mineral resources, and became important participants in the development of coal mining, transport and the growth of Newport. The estate was leased for mining, while the family was involved in the development of the Monmouthshire and Brecon Canal and the expansion of Newport as a commercial centre. Tredegar Park thus stood at the centre of an estate that connected the apparently pastoral world of the country house with the rapidly industrialising valleys and docks of south-east Wales.
The industrial transformation of south Wales forms an important part of Tredegar Park's story even though the park itself retained the appearance of an aristocratic country estate. The wealth generated from the wider estate helped sustain the mansion, gardens and park, while the growing industrial population around Newport lived in a social and economic world increasingly distant from that represented by the country house.
The family's immense landholding also gave them considerable political power. During the 1830s the Morgans became associated with the social tensions that eventually produced the Chartist movement and the Newport Rising of 1839. The Chartist movement sought wider political representation and greater rights for working people. Tredegar was one of the great landed estates against which the frustrations of an increasingly industrialised and politically excluded population could be directed.
The history of the estate therefore cannot be separated from the wider political and social history of nineteenth-century Newport and south Wales. The Morgans were simultaneously major landowners, industrial landlords, political figures and members of the aristocracy. Their position gave them extraordinary influence, while also making them symbols of the social order challenged by the Chartists.
During the Victorian period the Morgans remained among the most influential families in the region. Sir Charles Morgan became Baron Tredegar in 1859, while his great-nephew Godfrey Charles Morgan inherited the estate in 1875 and was later created Viscount Tredegar. Godfrey became particularly well known for his public benefaction and was remembered as “Godfrey the Good”.
He gave land for public purposes, including land associated with Belle Vue Park and the Royal Gwent Hospital, and reduced rents for tenants during periods of hardship. His relationship with the local community was consequently more complex than that of a remote aristocratic landowner, combining enormous private wealth and political influence with substantial philanthropy.
Tredegar Park also became a setting for sporting and social life. Cricket was played there during Godfrey Morgan's residence, with matches involving estate workers as well as more formal contests. The grounds provided the setting for the sort of country-house sporting culture characteristic of the Victorian landed elite. The park was therefore not merely decorative. It functioned as a working estate, a social landscape, a sporting ground and a visible expression of Morgan wealth and status.
The nineteenth century also saw changes to Tredegar House itself. The roof was altered, the earlier cupola and balustrade were removed, and parts of the building were remodelled. The south-east wing underwent substantial rebuilding. Much of the surrounding estate architecture and the gardens, however, retained elements of the earlier arrangement.
The survival of these different architectural and landscape layers is one of the reasons Tredegar is now regarded as an exceptionally important historic site. The house retains evidence of its medieval predecessor within the Restoration mansion, while the gardens and park preserve traces of successive periods of landscape design.
The twentieth century brought another distinctive phase. Courtenay Morgan was responsible for the creation of a small sunken rose garden around 1920. The garden had four rose beds enclosed by low box hedges, with paths and a central ornamental feature. It represented the continued adaptation of the grounds to changing horticultural tastes long after the great eighteenth-century landscape alterations.
The final Morgan generation at Tredegar was dominated by Evan Morgan, the second Viscount Tredegar, who died in 1949. Evan was an extraordinarily eccentric figure whose interests included literature, art, spiritualism, unusual animals, extravagant parties and occult practices. He knew prominent cultural figures including Augustus John, Charlie Chaplin and Aldous Huxley. His life has contributed disproportionately to the colourful popular mythology surrounding Tredegar House, although the deeper history of the estate is considerably older and more substantial than the eccentricities of its final resident.
By the middle of the twentieth century, the financial foundations of the estate had weakened severely. Heavy taxation, the costs of maintaining a huge country estate and the wider decline of the landed aristocracy made Tredegar increasingly difficult to sustain. After Evan Morgan's death, the estate could no longer be maintained in the manner expected of a great aristocratic residence.
The sale of Tredegar House and its grounds in 1951 marked the end of more than five centuries of Morgan ownership. The property subsequently became a Catholic girls' school. The house was adapted for educational use, and the surrounding estate was affected by the changing needs of the institution and by the wider development of Newport.
Newport Borough Council purchased Tredegar House in 1974. The council undertook restoration and conservation work and gradually returned the house to public use. The interiors were restored and refurnished with surviving Morgan objects, furniture and portraits, allowing the property to convey something of its former appearance and character.
The change was particularly significant because many great country houses had been demolished or irreversibly altered during the twentieth century. Tredegar survived as an unusually complete example of a major Welsh Restoration house with associated gardens and parkland.
The post-war decades brought further physical changes to the historic estate. The enormous landscape that had once extended over roughly 1,000 acres had already been reduced substantially, and twentieth-century development accelerated the process. Roads, housing, industrial estates, schools and other developments progressively occupied former estate land.
The construction and expansion of major roads, particularly the A48 and the M4, divided the surviving landscape into separate fragments. The original park is consequently much smaller today than it was during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The historic relationship between the house and the wider park remains visible in places, although it has been interrupted by modern infrastructure.
Tredegar Park was formally recognised for its historic importance when it was entered on the Register of Parks and Gardens of Special Historic Interest in Wales at Grade II*. The designation recognises the survival of elements from several periods, including the formal late seventeenth-century gardens, garden walls, gates, avenues and parts of the later landscape park.
Its importance is strengthened by its relationship with the Grade I listed Tredegar House, the surviving estate buildings, the historic garden features and the nearby Iron Age hillfort. The park is significant not because it survives completely unchanged, but because enough of its successive historical layers remain to make the evolution of the estate unusually legible.
The designation also acknowledges that the park has been heavily fragmented. The landscape that once formed a coherent designed estate is now divided between the surviving country park, agricultural land, woodland, residential areas, industrial development and transport infrastructure. The M4 is particularly significant because it cuts through the historic relationship between the house and the surviving northern and north-western parts of the estate.
Some sections of the old avenues survive despite these interruptions, allowing the historic scale and intention of the landscape to be reconstructed. The surviving oak avenue is particularly important because it preserves a direct visual relationship between the house and the wider park.
The present Tredegar House Country Park therefore represents only part of the historic Tredegar landscape. The publicly accessible area around the house, lake and gardens is approximately 90 acres, while other surviving fragments of the former park lie beyond it.
The northern and north-western portions retain open parkland, woodland, remnants of avenues and the Great Pool. The area once called the New Park survives in part as agricultural land, while other former estate lands have become housing, offices, schools and other developments.
The gardens around the house preserve further evidence of the estate's development. The formal walled gardens were reorganised during the early eighteenth century, replacing the arrangement of several smaller medieval-style enclosures with a more ordered sequence of larger garden compartments. Surviving walls, gateways, paths and garden features demonstrate how closely horticulture was integrated with the architecture of the mansion.
The gardens continued to evolve during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Ornamental planting, specimen trees, the lake landscape and the later rose garden introduced new tastes without entirely erasing the earlier design. The result is a layered garden in which Restoration, Georgian, Victorian and twentieth-century features coexist.
In 2012 Newport City Council entered into a long-term arrangement with the National Trust, which took over the management of Tredegar House, its gardens and parkland. The arrangement allowed the historic property to benefit from the National Trust's conservation expertise while remaining publicly owned. The National Trust now cares for the house, gardens and surviving parkland, combining conservation with public access and community use.
Tredegar Park is consequently best understood not simply as a pleasant public green space surrounding an impressive mansion, but as the surviving centre of a landscape that records more than seven centuries of changing society. Its story begins with prehistoric monuments and medieval settlement, continues through the rise of the Morgan family and the formation of their great estate, reaches an architectural and horticultural climax with the Restoration rebuilding and eighteenth-century landscape designs, and then follows the industrial, political and social transformation of south Wales.
The Victorian estate reflects the immense wealth and influence generated by land and industry, while the twentieth century records the decline of the aristocratic country-house system and the eventual transformation of Tredegar into a public heritage site.
The landscape visible today is therefore a palimpsest. The Great Pool belongs principally to the late eighteenth-century remodelling, surviving avenues recall the earlier formal park, the walled gardens preserve elements of the Restoration and early Georgian estate, the hillfort embodies a landscape more than two thousand years older than the house, and the surviving medieval remains at Gwern-y-Cleppa point towards an even earlier manorial landscape.
The roads, housing, industrial development and modern public facilities are themselves part of the later story, recording the transformation of Newport from an aristocratic and agricultural hinterland into a modern industrial and urban city.
Tredegar Park's greatest significance lies in the survival of these layers together. Few places in south Wales demonstrate so clearly how prehistoric monuments, medieval lordship, Welsh gentry culture, Restoration architecture, eighteenth-century landscape design, Victorian industrial wealth, Chartist-era politics, twentieth-century decline and modern public heritage can occupy the same landscape.
The present park may be only a fraction of the territory once controlled from Tredegar House, yet it remains the physical key to understanding the extraordinary history of the Morgan family and their relationship with Newport and south-east Wales. The surviving house, gardens, lake, avenues, parkland, archaeological monuments and estate buildings collectively preserve the story of a landscape that changed repeatedly while retaining its identity as Tredegar.
Today Tredegar Park is both a historic landscape and a public place. Its significance no longer depends upon aristocratic ownership or private display. The park has become part of the cultural and recreational life of Newport, allowing successive generations of local residents and visitors to encounter a landscape whose origins lie many centuries before the creation of the modern city.
The survival of Tredegar Park is particularly valuable because it makes visible the relationship between a great house and the wider landscape that sustained it. The mansion cannot be properly understood without its park, just as the park cannot be properly understood without the estate economy, the Morgan family, the surrounding communities and the wider historical development of south-east Wales.
Tredegar Park is therefore not simply the setting of Tredegar House. It is the physical record of the changing fortunes of one of Wales's most powerful families and of the society in which they lived. Its history encompasses medieval landholding, Welsh identity, aristocratic ambition, Restoration architecture, formal gardening, eighteenth-century landscape design, industrialisation, political conflict, Victorian philanthropy, aristocratic eccentricity, twentieth-century decline and modern conservation.
The landscape that remains is smaller and more fragmented than the great Morgan estate of the past, yet its principal historical relationships remain sufficiently intact to reveal the extraordinary continuity of the site. From the ancient hillfort and medieval park to the formal avenues, Great Pool, gardens and Restoration mansion, each surviving feature contributes another chapter to the history of Tredegar.
For this reason Tredegar Park remains one of the most important historic landscapes in the Newport area and one of the clearest surviving examples in south Wales of the evolution of a great landed estate across many centuries. Its present role as a public park is the latest chapter in a history that began long before the Morgans and continues long after the disappearance of the aristocratic world that created it.
With power routing through the back of the Evolve iPad enclosure you can completely conceal any cords or cables.
11th Evolving Practice of Ophthalmology Middle East Conference, Dubai World Trade Centre, 6 December 2024.
11th Evolving Practice of Ophthalmology Middle East Conference, Dubai World Trade Centre, 6 December 2024.
Styling:
Top, pants and skirt - EVOLVE
Hair - Watanabe "Miel" by Bliss
Shoes - Shark Extreme Heels II by NCore
Jewellry - "Alexandra" by Crystal Line
Bracelet - Burgundy by Loordes of London
Pose - Morgane Batista
11th Evolving Practice of Ophthalmology Middle East Conference, Dubai World Trade Centre, 7 December 2024.
Ken's redrawn mock up of the whiteboard graphic drawn in yesterday's workshop.
The picture is really starting to come together - looking great!
11th Evolving Practice of Ophthalmology Middle East Conference, Dubai World Trade Centre, 7 December 2024.
11th Evolving Practice of Ophthalmology Middle East Conference, Dubai World Trade Centre, 6 December 2024.
Awesome new exhibit at the Field Museum. Take that, creationists and krazee intelligent design people!
Evolve’s big Open Beta ended about a week or so ago, and the results are in. Evolve is an absolutely wonderful, fun and unique asymmetrical multiplayer/co-op experience. It’s even better than all of the gameplay videos would lead you to believe.
Evolve, in a nutshell, is an asymmetrical dea...