Ahead of Lost Gardens of London opening on 23 October, we look at one of London’s first ecological gardens, which once stood in the heart of the city next to Tower Bridge. Extracted from Lost Gardens of London by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan with photos by Jon May:
The prospect of creating an ecological park in central London was first mooted in 1974. The pioneering environmentalist Max Nicholson persuaded his fellow members of the Environmental Committee of the London Celebrations Committee for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee to create a park on an ‘unsightly patch of derelict land’ on the south bank of the Thames adjacent to Tower Bridge.
The initiative would later become known as the William Curtis Ecological Park, named in honour of the Bermondsey-based botanist, who, in the eighteenth century, devoted himself to the study of the flora of the metropolis. The project had two overarching aims: to convert a former lorry park into a ‘new Ecological Park’ that was to form a link in a ‘chain of environmental improvements’ along the length of the Silver Jubilee Walkway; and to encourage Londoners to ‘look at their river and enjoy it’. The Walkway was a pedestrian path that snaked its way from Leicester Square, over Lambeth Bridge and along the South Bank to Tower Bridge, ending at Tower Hill. It was intended to be a ‘comprehensive, stimulating, and economical means of leaving some mark from the jubilee, not only on the face of London, but on the attitude of Londoners, and of visitors . . . to the London heritage in its many forms’.
The concept of the park appealed to all involved on the grounds that it could be created reasonably quickly, and at little cost, and that would form a handsome setting for Tower Bridge and its environs. Two acres (0.8 hectare) of ground were therefore made available to the Trust for Urban Ecology (TRUE) by Hays Wharf and the London Borough of Southwark on a short-term lease, on the condition that the park would be temporary and that the land upon which it was to be built would be surrendered when the planned development went ahead.
The park was developed within a five-week period under the supervision of the warden-naturalist Jeremy Cotton, with generous amounts of volunteer labour, at a cost of £2,000. A large pond was excavated, into which toad and frog tadpoles and sticklebacks were introduced; innumerable shrubs and nine hundred native trees were planted around it, including alder, willow, birch and pine.
Nicholson is said to have been inspired by the work of Lyndis Cole, the Ecological Adviser to the Ecological Parks Trust, who had in turn been encouraged by Dutch techniques for the establishment of natural plant communities in urban areas, as seen in the heemparken, or native-plant gardens, across the Netherlands. Cole’s plan proposed the creation of a small pond and areas of mixed woodland and willow carr.
The garden opened in May 1977 to mixed reviews: some were astonished by the transformation of the former hard standing into a species-rich oasis, while others were ‘depressed’ by its ‘unimaginative, barren urban ugliness’. It was, nevertheless, an ecological triumph: within a year no less than two hundred species were alleged to be thriving within the park, and the diversity of birds had also increased. It also became a very popular attraction for local school children, over 100,000 of whom visited the park during its short lifespan. It is a measure of the park’s success that, in anticipation of its imminent destruction in the late summer of 1985, hundreds of school children joined the ‘great frog rescue’, carrying ‘5,000 frogs to safety’ before the bulldozers moved in.
The park was levelled as planned, and the site is now occupied by London City Hall and Potter’s Fields Park. Its demolition coincided with the Daily Mirror’s Living Britain Campaign, which asked the question: ‘Do you care about the environment?’
The Royal Town Planning Institute was also, in the early 1980s, advocating the transformation of derelict sites into urban, semi-natural parks as a means of improving inner urban areas. Like TRUE, the institute acknowledged their potential to provide visual amenity and valuable education resources for local schools. Among the projects it was involved with was an ecological survey of some vacant or ‘wilderness sites’ in Hackney, many of which had ‘complex and interesting plant communities’ and were ‘valuable refuges for a wide range of wildlife’.
Hackney Grove Gardens was created in 1982, on the site of a burnt-out toy factory adjacent to Hackney Town Hall, by a community arts organisation in collaboration with Free Form Arts, a community arts trust. Whereas the local council was keen to develop the derelict, half-acre (0.2-hectare) sunken site into a car park, local residents petitioned the council for the provision of a ‘landscaped garden’. In the event, the council agreed to a short-term lease of the site while they considered options for its future development. The resultant community garden was designed and built by Free Form’s ‘artists-activists’ in association with residents and funded by the Hackney Planning Department. The plan was simple: steps and a gently sloping path led down from the street to a rockery and a performance space, and a serpentine path threaded through the site to form a circuit. The scheme was singled out for praise in the Department of the Environment’s publication Greening City Sites: Good Practice in Urban Regeneration (1987) because of the high intensity of use it received. Despite this endorsement, the site was destroyed in 1996 to make way for Hackney Central Library and Museum.
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Extracted from Lost Gardens of London by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan published by the Modern Art Press (and distributed by Yale University Press), available now in the museum shop.