Summary
Semi-detached house, now four flats. Late-C19 house; ground-floor flat contains an Outsider artist visionary environment created by Ron Gittins between 1986 and 2019. The interiors of the upper-floor flats are excluded from the listing.
Reasons for Designation
Number 8 Silverdale Road, Oxton, containing a ground-floor flat with a visionary environment by Ron Gittins, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:
Architectural interest:
* the ground-floor flat (Ron’s Place) contains a unique visionary environment created over a period of 33 years, that is a notable example of large-scale Outsider Art created outside the influence of the mainstream art world, and which compares favourably with global examples of the genre;
* extensive in scale, the visionary environment encompasses the entire ground floor, transforming the flat into a highly idiosyncratic, creative and compellingly immersive artistic space that reflects its creator’s powerful imagination and clarity of personal vision; a key characteristic of Outsider Art;
* notable and highly-skilled architectural elements are blended with artistic elements, including the huge, hand-moulded concrete roaring lion’s head and Minotaur’s head fireplaces in the front rooms, whilst varying room themes merge careful historical research with more individualistic interpretations, all utilising non-traditional materials.
History
Ron Gittins (1939-2019) was born to a working-class family in Birkenhead, the second of three children born to Alice and James Gittins. His father worked in the merchant navy and later at the Camel Laird Shipyard. Ron was a creative and musically gifted child. He attended the Laird School of Art in Birkenhead for a short time and studied drama at a local college, becoming a powerful orator by practising scenes from Shakespeare. As an adult his working life was varied, his strongly held opinions and dislike of taking directions often resulting in jobs being short-lived. At one time he worked as a self-employed artist painting murals and portraits as “Minstrel Enterprises”, though with limited success. Ron is also understood to have commenced theological training as a Methodist minister. His self-professed career as a spy for the “Secret Service” is less verifiable, though no less lived by Ron.
Ron was a complex man with an idiosyncratic personality, deeply private, close to his family, also at times described as frustratingly difficult, whilst colourful and flamboyantly engaging. He was well known in the local community, many of whom have affectionate memories of his dramatic flair for dressing up in costumes and accessorises all hand-made by himself, including various military uniforms, a Roman centurion, and as a troubadour busking with his guitar, when visiting the local shops.
He moved into the ground-floor flat at 8 Silverdale Road, Oxton, in 1986, living there on his own for the next 33 years until his death in September 2019, aged 79. The late-C19 semi-detached house, which first appears on the 1:2500 Ordnance Survey map surveyed 1897, published 1899, was by this time divided into four rented flats. Ron’s tenancy agreement, which allowed him to “decorate the interior of the property to his own taste and the external porch in classical style without prior written consent of the Landlord”, unleashed his creativity upon his home over this period. Though Ron was extremely proud of his artwork, its existence was largely unknown as when it began enveloping most surfaces he feared expulsion and generally refused entry to the landlord and other officials, also keeping most visitors, including his family, at arm’s length. Externally, the only clue to the fantastical world within was the sculpted concrete columns representing the Battle of Actium (where Roman leader Octavian won a decisive battle against the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra) which flanked the front door.
After Ron unexpectedly died in September 2019 his family entered the flat to find he had comprehensively decorated every room, particularly drawing upon his obsessive passion for history, said to have been triggered by a trip to Pompeii as a young man. The Egyptian, Roman, Greek, naval and aquatic themed rooms created a deeply immersive environment, acting as stage sets in which Ron had lived his life. Particularly eye-catching were the huge three-dimensional fireplaces hand moulded by him from wet concrete. The two front reception rooms, used by Ron as his living room and his workroom, had respectively a lion’s head and a bull or Minotaur’s head, both three metres in height. The rear kitchen had a Roman or Middle Eastern bread oven, and the rear bedroom had a fireplace with salmon jambs. An extensive clear-up of Ron’s vast hoard of materials collected for future use was needed to reveal the true extent of his vision. Various intrinsic possessions, including his sewing machine, pots of paint brushes, musical instruments, wardrobe filled with his costumes, props, paper mache figures and heads have been kept.
A group, later a charitable trust, of volunteers and family was set up to try and safeguard Ron’s artwork, initially continuing to rent the property from the landlord and use it as a venue for creative and wellbeing events for local communities. In early 2023 the landlord unexpectedly put the building up for auction. Following coverage in the national press and media, the trust with the support of a charitable trust who had been involved with the preservation of the David Parr House, Cambridge, home to an artisan Arts and Crafts decorator (Grade II*, National Heritage List for England: 1470294), were able to buy it, securing the long-term future of Ron’s Place.
The front door columns were removed due to safety concerns following Ron’s death and prior to the property being re-rented to the group/trust and subsequent auction.
OUTSIDER ART AND VISIONARY ENVIRONMENTS
Outsider Art is an internationally recognised creative phenomenon understood by mainstream museums and galleries and increasingly popular with collectors and curators. It often transcends genres and goes under a variety of umbrella terms, including Art Brut (raw art), Folk art, Intuitive art/Visionary art and Naïve art. With no agreed fixed name, the use of the term Outsider Art may be seen to be controversial, though it is the most commonly used term by nationally recognised proponents. A key feature of Outsider Art, and the artists involved, is that the work is created without an audience in mind, and often purely for themselves. More commonly associated with individual pieces of work, such as paintings, murals and sculptures, and crafted from materials to hand, examples of Outsider Art can now be found in galleries in the UK and around the world, including the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Collection at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; the Tate, London; American Visionary Art Museum, Maryland, US; Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art, Chicago, US; Prinzhorn Collection, Heilberg, Germany; and the Museum of the Mind/Outsider Art, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Examples are also available for sale in commercial galleries that specialise in selling pieces of Outsider Art.
A less common strand of Outsider Art is that of visionary environments, where a physical environment is transformed into an alternative world, of which Ron’s Place at 8 Silverdale Road is an example. Also working outside the influence of the mainstream art world, the artists usually have no formal training and often innovatively use salvaged or recycled materials which are cheaply and readily available, such as concrete, which can be sculpted when wet. Certain characteristics are demonstrated, including a clarity of personal vision engaging a powerful imagination, the incorporation of architectural aspects, and a single-mindedness (often presenting as a sense of intense compulsion) in creating highly individual and compellingly immersive spaces. The work is also usually created over a period of years, if not decades. Many, as here, are created both as an artistic environment and a domestic residence, contrasting sharply with their surrounding built environment.
Details
Semi-detached house, now four flats. Late-C19 house; ground-floor flat contains an Outsider artist visionary environment created by Ron Gittins between 1986 and 2019. The interiors of the upper-floor flats are excluded from the listing.
MATERIALS: orange brick laid in English garden wall bond with stone dressings. Orange concrete roof tiles.
PLAN: the house is set back on the north side of Silverdale Road and forms the left-hand side of a pair of semi-detached houses of two storeys with an attic floor and a basement, originally with a full-height staircase located centrally to the rear (now partially removed). The building is now divided into four flats. The ground-floor flat (Ron’s Place) has a full-depth entrance hall with rooms opening off each side. The front left reception room was Ron’s workroom, the front right reception room was his living room. Beyond to the left is a bathroom and a rear bedroom, and to the right is a kitchen with a small outshot.
There are two flats on the first floor* and one flat on the attic floor*, the interiors of which are not of special interest. All are accessed by a later external staircase* to the rear of the property, which is not of special interest.
EXTERIOR:
Front elevation: the front elevation is of three bays with a gabled attic to the left bay. It has a brick plinth, first-floor stone sill band (painted), moulded-brick stringcourses incorporating hoodmoulds on the ground and first floors, timber bargeboards to the gable, and a brick modillion eaves cornice. A brick corbelled stack is shared with the mirror-image paired house. The windows have mainly timber plate-glass horned sashes. The central front doorway (to Ron’s Place) has an overlight with stone jambs and imposts with pennant and pointed arch relief carvings and a segmental-arched brick head beneath the string course hoodmould. The three-panelled wooden door is covered in hessian painted with almost indiscernible pale greyish symbols. On the ground floor the left bay (Ron’s workroom) has a canted bay window on the ground floor with stone sills and lintels with ogee relief carvings over the three windows. Beneath the central window is a bricked-up cellar window. The right bay (Ron’s living room) has a pair of segmental-arched windows with stringcourse hoodmoulds and stone sill and impost blocks. The first floor has similar paired segmental-arched windows in the left and right bays (those to the left bay have replaced uPVC sash glazing*, which is not of special interest), and a single window to the centre. The attic window to the gable has a segmental brick head, stone sill and impost blocks (painted), and replaced uPVC glazing* (the uPVC glazing is not of special interest). The roof has concrete tile coverings and a small dormer window has a replacement uPVC frame* (the uPVC glazing is not of special interest).
Side elevation: the side elevation has two slightly projecting fireplace shafts (stacks removed), a plinth at the right-hand corner wrapping round from the front elevation, and a brick modillion eaves cornice. The ground floor has a central segmental-arched window with a timber two-over-two pane horned sash (Ron’s bathroom), with two first-floor windows and a gabled dormer window, all with replaced uPVC frames* (the uPVC glazing is not of special interest). Fixed to the left-hand side is a later external iron staircase with outer railings* (the staircase is not of special interest) which rises and wraps around to a upper-floor landings at the rear of the house accessing the upper-floor flats.
Rear elevation: the rear elevation is plain with a corbelled brick stack to the left (which it shares) and irregular fenestration. All the windows have stone sills and segmental-arched brick heads, except the attic window directly under the eaves, which has a square head. On the ground floor is a boarded-up doorway with a lower kitchen window to the left (Ron’s kitchen) and a pair of taller windows (Ron’s bedroom) to the right, with two-over-two pane horned sashes. To the immediate left of the kitchen window and abutting the boundary wall is a small brick outshot with a lean-to roof roofed in concrete tiles and a segmental-arched doorway and a bricked-up window to the side elevation. The external staircase* (not of special interest) accesses two inserted uPVC doors* for the first-floor flats and a similar uPVC door* to the attic flat, all of which have been altered from window openings (the uPVC doors are not of special interest). To the first floor is a two-over-two horned-sash window, and remaining upper windows have uPVC frames* (the uPVC glazing is not of special interest).
INTERIOR
The ground floor of the house contains the visionary environment created by Ron Gittins. Outsider artists, of which Ron is an example, work outside the influence of the mainstream art world, usually with no formal training and often using non-traditional art materials. Their work demonstrates certain characteristics, including a clarity of personal vision engaging a powerful imagination and a single-mindedness, often presenting as a sense of compulsion, to create highly individual and compelling immersive spaces.
RON’S PLACE (ground-floor flat): the front door opens into a small lobby with a timber moulded and glazed inner screen with a door with two panes of textured glazing and a panel beneath. Both door faces in the lobby are scumble-painted brown and the architrave and screen are painted cream. The ceiling has a modillion cornice with applied painted material corner segments and star shape around a central fruit ceiling rose. The right-hand side wall is textured and painted in an abstract way with blues, oranges and pinks with overdrawn dark lines. The paint on the left-hand side wall is flaking with traces of oranges and blues, dark lines low down and white over-sketching, including figures, close to the ceiling.
The walls of the long entrance hall are painted with an Egyptian tomb theme. The lower, dado level of the side walls and front of the boxed-in foot of the former house staircase at the rear of the hall are painted yellow with various Egyptian figures and an upper border of blue hieroglyphs. A central band of dark blue is painted with Egyptian images in dark blue-black lines, including a Sphinx to the right and Anubis to the left. Above is a white frieze framed with narrow red lines with colourful hieroglyphs and a wider yellow band with cream and brown hieroglyphs. On the rear wall, next to the boxed-in section, is a full-height painting of a seated Cleopatra (glamorously channelling Elizabeth Taylor) wearing a white dress, wide colourful collar necklace and golden headdress, holding an ivy branch against a blue background. On the side wall to her left is a standing male figure wearing a shendyt (loin cloth), a hedjet (the white crown of upper Egypt) and the false beard of a pharaoh, against a blue-green background. The floorboards are painted with a diamond pattern of pinks with blue spots to the corners and a frame of rectangles and squares of red, blue and yellow with cream-painted skirting boards of differing heights. The ceiling is subdivided by a corbelled, depressed arch. In front of the arch is a moulded cornice with a rectangle of painted material tacked to the ceiling with four groups of tacks along the centre. The hall widens slightly on the left-hand side beyond the arch with a moulded cornice to the ceiling. On the left-hand side is a large doorway to the front reception room (Ron’s workroom) and two lower doorways beyond the arch (to the bathroom and Ron’s bedroom). On the right-hand side, beyond the arch, is a similar large doorway to the front reception room (Ron’s living room) and a lower doorway to the kitchen. All have cream-painted, moulded architraves and four-panelled doors with the exception of the kitchen where the door has been removed. To the right of the living room door the wall paintings are overwritten with chalked telephone numbers.
The left-hand front reception room (Ron’s workroom) has a Greek theme and is dominated by the huge hand-moulded concrete Minotaur’s head fireplace in the centre of the outer side wall. The three-dimensional, horned head is painted in realistic colours with a grate set inside the open mouth. A red, textured background to the head overlaps wall paintings. The walls have a moulded picture rail and an enriched cornice, and there are moulded architraves to the door and bay window, all painted cream. The frieze is painted light blue with painted grisaille busts of Greek philosophers set at regular intervals on the picture rail. The lower wall is painted terracotta mostly with grisaille Greek figures, though a male figure to the right of the fireplace wears a red toga and yellow wreath. The inner wall, to the right of the doorway, has a large sheet with the outline of a figure on a horse (possibly William of Orange) tacked to it. Much of the original plaster in the front bay has had to be removed due to a former leak.
The right-hand front reception room (Ron’s living room) has a Roman theme with images derived from frescoes at Pompeii, Stabiae and Herculaneum. The chimneybreast in the centre of the outer side wall has a huge hand-moulded concrete lion’s head fireplace snarling with an open mouth (containing the grate) and prominent fangs, possibly inspired by the zoomorphic fireplaces at the mid-C15 - mid-C16 Villa Della Torre in Fumane, Italy. It is painted with a bronze effect and has glass shards to the eyes. The walls have a moulded picture rail, painted black, enriched cornice painted gold, deep skirting board scumble-painted blue and moulded architraves scumble-painted a bluey-green. The black-painted frieze is painted with coloured figures and animals taken from ancient friezes. Three of the walls are painted red with painted festoons hanging from the picture rail. The inner side wall has a large horizontal rectangular painting of Neptune and Amymone taken from a fresco in the Villa Carmiano in Stabiae, with the doorway in the right-hand corner. On each side of the fireplace and on the wall to the left of the doorway are painted panels of ancient Roman figurative scenes. The front wall is painted in a purple veined marble effect with a black, vertical rectangular panel on each side of the window with a grisaille figure painting. The floorboards are painted with an indistinct pattern of small spots, possibly evoking decorative pebble floors. The ceiling is entirely painted with a heroic celestial scene featuring a Roman warrior, perhaps Horatius.
The narrow bathroom to the left of the hall has an aquatic theme with the walls and ceiling painted with different types of fish and other aquatic animals. The lower walls feature sea creatures, including an octopus and squid, flat fish and hammerhead shark. The upper walls featured freshwater fish, including pike and brown trout, and the ceiling has other waterside creatures, including a frog and dragonflies.
The left-hand rear room (Ron’s bedroom) has a naval theme. In the centre of the outer side wall is a hand-moulded concrete mantelpiece with salmon jambs with open-mouthed heads at their bases. The mantelpiece is pink scumble-painted with inset concrete cheek tiles painted blue and a cast-iron grate. The room has an enriched cornice and moulded architraves, all painted cream, and pink-painted walls with a pale blue frieze. The frieze has painted roundels of famous seafarers’ busts and ships at regular intervals. The fireplace wall has an oval portrait over the mantelpiece of Lady Hamilton (believed to be a portrait of Josie, a traveller girl who Ron knew) in an elaborate painted frame. Flanking the fireplace are two rectangular portraits in painted frames. To the left is a gentleman wearing the uniform based on that of a Vice Admiral of the Royalist French Naval Fleet 1789-1794. To the right is the English Naval Commander Lord Nelson (understood to be copied from a pub sign). The wall to the left of the doorway has a large, horizontal rectangular painting of the Bay of Naples in a painted frame. The inner side wall has a large, horizontal rectangular scene of two Viking ships in a painted frame, with the doorway in the right-hand corner. To each side of the window is a painted oval panel, that to the left is dark pink with the outline of a figure and to the right is a portrait of a blond-haired woman set in a painted frame. The ceiling is entirely painted using a variety of colours in a partly abstract and partly figurative scene, including two men in Roman uniforms and a female figurehead.
The right-hand rear kitchen descends two steps and has a painted floor of red, black and white diamonds. In the centre of the outer side wall is a fireplace of hand-moulded concrete in the general form of an historic Roman or Middle Eastern bread oven, though embellished with engaged columns and relief embellishments including zig-zags and Maltese crosses. The moulded overmantel has a central seal of the Order of the Knights Templar with niches to each side with a Knight Templar to the left and a Knight of Malta to the right. The fireplace is flanked by two built-in timber cupboards, painted cream.
UPPER-FLOOR FLATS*: the interiors of the upper-floor flats have been altered and are not of special interest.
* Pursuant to s1 (5A) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 ("the Act") it is declared that these aforementioned features are not of special architectural or historic interest, however, any works which have the potential to affect the character of the listed building as a building of special architectural or historic interest may still require LBC and this is a matter for the LPA to determine.
