The Heart and Walton's Town Centre

Walton’s modern town centre is largely a twenty-first-century creation, built over a 1960s development that had become tired and run down by the time it was redeveloped. A short walk away, a very different, more distinctive piece of 1960s architecture told a stranger story until its own demolition a few years ago: a corporate headquarters that once kept flamingos, penguins and alligators in its internal courtyards.

From tired 1960s centre to The Heart

Walton’s town centre was substantially rebuilt in the 1960s, in the manner of many British town centres of the period, but by the early twenty-first century that development had fallen into poor repair. Its replacement, branded The Heart, brought together retail, housing and public facilities including the library in a single redevelopment, adding 279 one- and two-bedroom apartments alongside the shops, many of them looking out over the private gardens and public section of the former Ashley Park estate. The redevelopment has been held up since as a model of how a struggling town centre scheme can be rebuilt around genuinely mixed use, rather than retail alone.

The Hepworth commemoration

The Heart’s High Street entrance carries a small, deliberate piece of local memory: Hepworth’s early films are periodically projected there, a quiet nod to Cecil Hepworth’s pioneering film studio, which operated a short distance away for over sixty years. It is an easy thing to miss on a routine shopping trip, and exactly the kind of detail that rewards knowing the town’s history before you visit.

The Birds Eye building

A short distance from The Heart, on Station Avenue, stood one of the more unusual pieces of twentieth-century commercial architecture in Surrey: Walton Court, built in 1961 to 1962 by the architects Sir John Burnet, Tait and Partners, with an extension added in 1967 to 1968, as the UK headquarters of Birds Eye Foods. It was a long, three-storey rectangular building faced in full-height plate glass curtain walling and dark blue vitreous enamelled spandrel panels, set beside a reflective pool with a bronze bird sculpture by John McCarthy, and was later listed Grade II, in November 1995, in recognition of its architectural significance.

The building’s most talked-about feature, though, was never the architecture. Its two internal courtyards housed a small menagerie of exotic animals, flamingos, penguins and, most improbably, alligators, kept to entertain staff and impress visitors before eventually being relocated to London Zoo. Birds Eye, and later Unilever after it acquired the brand, occupied the building until 2008, after which it stood empty for roughly a decade. Demolition began in 2019, and the site has since been redeveloped as Walton Court Gardens, a residential scheme of 375 apartments across nine blocks; publicly stated plans for the scheme include reinstalling the site’s war memorial, the same memorial associated nearby with Flight Sergeant Charles Sydney, whose Spitfire crashed in Station Avenue in 1940.

Retail history and redevelopment

Between them, The Heart and the former Birds Eye building tell two different versions of the same story: a town centre that has been substantially rebuilt more than once in the last sixty years, each time responding to what the previous generation’s development got wrong. Walton’s town centre today, focused on the High Street and The Heart, functions as the practical heart of the modern town exactly as its name suggests, while carrying, in details like the Hepworth film screenings and the planned reinstatement of the war memorial at Walton Court Gardens, a genuine memory of what stood on or near the same ground before it.