Rooting through London's Lost Gardens
My 5 favourite stories from the Garden Museum's latest exhibition on London's forgotten gardens and green spaces
There are glasshouses on the forecourt with potted seedlings locked inside. Behind them, the deconsecrated church of St Mary-at-Lambeth, home to the museum collection, towers over the palace road and the river beyond. Espaliered trees grow against the walls, wired and bare in the winter sun that rubs against panes of stained glass and makes shadows out of feathered palms. This place of worship has been reassigned to the original goddess, and here at the heart of the sprawling city, layers rest upon layers of hallowed, living ground.
My own lost London drifts past the train window as we pull through the city suburbs. A fox sleeps on a sunny bank outside Raynes Park, where I worked in the wetland centre café. Hello Wandsworth, where I worked as an RSPB fundraiser. There goes Wimbledon where my old boyfriend lived, and there’s Clapham Junction where I used to wait for my train home to Hampshire, not long before I realised I was not made for city life.
I gave it a go. I did the London thing for nine whole months. My last (and best) city job was a Christmas temp at Fortnum & Mason, dressed in a cool eau de nil uniform that made me look like an air hostess, grinding Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee beans for millionaires and sharing tins of broken biscuits out the back with my fellow peasant co-workers. I came back to London after Christmas, realised I hated it, broke up with my boyfriend (nice guy, bad match), caught the train home to Petersfield and never looked back.
But I always love a day trip to London. Who couldn’t? Watching the tall, crazy buildings fly by as we grind towards Waterloo. So many lives crammed into tiny spaces. Who built those elephant and castle signs at Vauxhall Cross? Who painted the ghost signs above those red-brick terraced streets? Big Ben appears and disappears and reappears again between each glass-fronted apartment block. Hypnotic, impossible city. A good friend, but not family.
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