The gardens that had to make way for London’s growth

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Writing on the ‘evanescent’ nature of gardens, Humphry Repton asked rhetorically why ‘a wreath of short-lived roses’ delights us more than ‘a crown of amaranth, or everlasting flowers’. This exhibition’s curator, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, who cites the great landscape designer, induces similar bittersweet feelings about the loss of London’s green spaces. He does so by peopling them vividly. Alighting on stories of individual squares, aviaries or botanic gardens, nurseries, artificial mounts or hippodromes, we never lose sight of the reason for their disappearance, whether it be new roads or street widenings, the encroachment of railways or, simply, suburban sprawl.

As the metropolis expanded and ever more people were pulled into its maw, the tussle between private land and public interest became increasingly acute. An etching by Wenceslaus Hollar, before 1666, presents an astonishing bird’s-eye view of the Strand, with the serene courts and splendid gardens of palace after palace running down to the Thames’s edge: an aristocratic artery of unparalleled horticultural richness, from Temple Bar to Charing Cross. Northumberland House, a majestic Jacobean mansion, was the last to be demolished (in 1874), making way for Joseph Bazalgette’s sewerage system, and the shrubs from its by then ‘sad and ghastly’ grounds were dug up to form the basis of the Embankment’s new public gardens. Over in Bloomsbury, the vast funnel-shaped park of the parish’s hereditary landlords, the Russell family, is shown in a plan of c. 1795. Presaging a move to greener pastures, the 4th Duke of Bedford expressed fears he would be ‘poisoned by the dust and deafened by the noise’ of the planned New (now Pentonville) Road. By 1800, the estate’s grounds had morphed into new streets, plus Russell, Tavistock, Gordon and Woburn squares.

Bird’s-eye view of the ‘West Central District’ by Wenceslaus Hollar (detail), before 1666, showing the gardens of the ‘great houses’ that formerly lined the waterside of the Strand. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C.

Although Longstaffe-Gowan has organised his relatively roomy accompanying book into 11 thematic chapters, that approach wouldn’t have worked in the Garden Museum’s temporary exhibition space, an elegant box off the nave of the deconsecrated St Mary-at-Lambeth. Not only has his material had to be tightly pruned, it has also been arranged ‘randomly’, neither by chronology nor geography. Instead, visitors are told to imagine themselves as taking a stroll through the capital; we flâneurs, then, must be cosmic ones, unconstrained by time and space. But if the metaphor doesn’t quite work, the show surely does. The curator, a landscape designer who founded the London Gardener journal in 1995, is deeply rooted in his material and has weeded it judiciously. The pithy captions, wittily edged in funereal black (RIP William Curtis Ecological Park!), are rich in anecdote, and marginalia magpies will have plenty of titbits to carry home.

Many of the 19th-century gardens on display are exuberantly eccentric, shot through with a sense of the world shrunk by travel, measurable by science and domesticated by imperial dominion. As seen in a series of watercolours, the surgeon John Hunter, at his property by the present-day Earls Court station, laid out his grounds like a zoological garden, complete with a farm, menagerie and institute of anatomy. Topped with an armed rampart to deter intruders, a large tumulus in one corner (dubbed the Lions’ Den) held his wildest beasts. A stone crocodile, its jaws wide open, surmounted the villa’s front door, while flanking the entry gates were two rockeries dotted with giant clam shells and chained eagles. As John O’Keeffe commented in 1827, ‘the latter eagles might consider themselves very well off to escape dissection; for their owner dissected every thing that came his way’.

William Curtis Ecological Park next to Tower Bridge (1977–1985). © Jon May

Wealthy oddball Dr John Samuel Phené, who lived in an ornament-encrusted ‘freak’ house in Chelsea, traced his family tree back to the Phoenicians. That pride in his ‘ancient descent’ was expressed in his 1.5 hectare garden, seen here in a 1912 post-mortem photograph, a gallimaufry of ‘meaningless iron and marble, ecclesiastical symbols, baths, allegorical nymphs and cupids, and church furniture’ picked up on his travels, as the Daily Chronicle reported. The thrill of exotic spectacle was equally intoxicating to Victorians in the public realm. In the 1840s, during the heyday of the New Globe Tavern, Mile End, ballets were staged, battles re-enacted and 10,000 lights illuminated in its pleasure grounds. A few years earlier Surrey Zoological Gardens in Southwark combined a gargantuan painted panorama, 300 metres across, with its own lake to create a ‘real water’ Bay of Naples, behind which, thanks to a gifted pyrotechnician, eruptions of Mount Vesuvius were regularly scheduled.

Mount Vesuvius at Surrey Zoological Gardens in 1837. London Metropolitan Archives (City of London)

On the whole, Longstaffe-Gowan reports the loss of such amenities with an air of wry detachment. His ire is reserved for the despoliation of the area around Euston Station, which has seen some five gardens destroyed or built over between 1925 and 2018. As a letter to the Times in 1890 bewails: ‘the mere existence of a great railways terminus seems to be a standing menace to every open space in its neighbourhood’. The mature trees, clumps of shrubs and informal paths of one such casualty, Mornington Crescent, are beautifully captured here in a 1912 oil painting by Spencer Gore, who lived in nearby Ampthill Square (also consumed by widening train tracks). In the face of local protest, the land was sold by developers to become the Egyptian Revival-style factory of the Carreras Cigarette Company: a dark irony given the oxygenating virtues of plants. Such landgrabs were particularly injurious to the poor. In the East End, especially before the 85-hectare Victoria Park opened to the public in 1845, opportunities for recreation and relief from the sooty air were meagre. Peerless Pool, opposite St Luke’s Workhouse in Finsbury, was London’s first publicly accessible swimming bath and thrived for almost 300 years (Fig. 1). In the late 19th century, the ‘People’s Garden’ and children’s playground were formed inside the Royal London hospital in destitute Whitechapel. Complete with a fishpond and fernery, a fountain and an aviary with parrots, it’s shown in a steel engraving of 1884, benches thronged with weary-looking passers-by. Surviving wartime bomb damage, the little oasis ultimately made way for an Institute of Pathology in 1961.

For services to psychogeography, I tip my hat to the prime movers behind this show; the capital seems even more alive now. Rather than mourn, we should instead make plans. Nigel Dunnett, responsible for the Barbican’s gardens, has written inspiringly about transformational urban greening – interconnected corridors of planting in traditionally ‘no-go’ areas for horticulture, such as streets, pavements, roofs, business parks or derelict building sites. What better way to reduce pollution, stop London drying out and enhance its inhabitants’ well-being? If ‘gardens’ were not just behind fences but sewn into the city’s fabric, perhaps they’d be harder to destroy.

‘Lost Gardens of London’ is at the Garden Museum, London, until 2 March.

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.