President of London Parks & Gardens
Sustaining and Protecting London’s Greenspaces
Last autumn I was privileged to curate an exhibition at the Garden Museum on lost gardens of London. I have long been beguiled by capital’s vast and diverse legacy of gardens – ranging from princely riverside estates and ‘animated gardens’ (menageries and aviaries), to squares, humble allotments, nurseries, botanic gardens, zoological and ecological gardens, cemeteries and suburban retreats – so the opportunity to explore those that had vanished over the past half a millennium was a wonderful indulgence.
The aims of my exhibition and its accompanying book (Lost Gardens of London) were twofold: to recover and celebrate an array of gardens that no longer exist, but of which tantalising fragments remain that supply some hint of what has been lost; gardens that are known solely through the eyes of topographers, artists or writers, or through the echoes of surviving elements that attest to their former presence. My second aim was to remind us what a precious asset gardened space is and how over the centuries it has contributed to the quality of life and well-being of generations of Londoners.
London Open Gardens 2025 is an opportunity for garden lovers everywhere to express their enduring affection and support for the capital’s greenspaces. This year, as the gates to over one hundred gardens are thrown open to welcome the curious, we should pause to reflect on both our good fortune that London is so well-endowed with verdant oases, and that we must do our utmost to sustain and protect these invaluable ‘breathing spaces’ for posterity. The nature of gardens is that they are at the best of times precarious and vulnerable, fleeting and ever-changing, and they are especially so in a metropolitan context. It is this transitory quality of gardens that makes them so alluring and poignant – that gives them an ‘ecstatic charm’.
A few gardens open this Open Gardens weekend have come within a whisker of being built over. In 1903 the central garden of Edwardes Square (est. 1811) in Kensington – a delightfully picturesque and ‘socially select and largely self-governing enclave’ – was put up for sale by its freeholder the sixth Lord Kensington. Although the sale became a cause célèbre and precipitated the passing of the London Squares and Enclosures (Preservation) Act of 1906, the latter did not apply to Edwardes Square. In 1910 the square’s new owners renewed their assault on the central garden – this time threatening to erect a cinema over the whole. In the event, a ‘difficult group of householders’, with the assistance of the London County Council (LCC) and the Kensington Committee, thwarted the ambitions of the speculative builders and in 1912 the enclosure was given protection in perpetuity.
Mecklenburgh Square (est. 1804) in Bloomsbury, was also for some years imperilled. In 1924 it was sold by the Foundling Hospital Estate with a view to becoming the new home of Covent Garden Market. The proposal aroused intense opposition from the residents of the ‘menaced square’ and the tenants of the market, and the ‘Garden Market Removal Bill’ was eventually withdrawn.
Such depredations were not uncommon: over 40 garden squares were threatened with destruction in the mid-1920s. Indeed, such acts of vandalism continue to take place today: within the past decade a dozen giant plane trees were felled in Euston Square Gardens (est. 1812), and the ground paved over to make way for a temporary taxi rank and cycle stands; and the remains of St James’s Burial Ground (est. c.1788) were ploughed up to enable the expansion of Euston Station for the HS2 rail link.
As a correspondent to the Times declared on the eve of the Euston Station’s assault on the same burial ground in May 1883, ‘every little space where the wind can freely circulate, and air charged with human breath and all the vapours emanating from human habitations can, in however small a degree, be purified by contact with leaves and grass, is of vital importance to the health of London’.
Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
April 2025
