WHAT? Lost Gardens of London 

WHERE? Garden Museum, 5 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB

WHEN? Now until 2nd March 2025

WHY GO? Lost but not forgotten.  Londoners love a green space, botanical park, even a humble allotment but many have fallen foul to mass urbanisation and this engaging little exhibition honours those that brought joy to the lives of city dwellers in the past.

Aptly in the Garden Museum, it explores London’s affection for gardens, some long gone but others having left a legacy that has inspired today’s generation to ‘green’ every nook and cranny available in the metropolis. 

From public Pleasure Parks to private gardens owned by wealthy eccentrics, it reminds green fingered fans of gardens that once famously existed. 

Take Peerless Pool, near what is now Old Street Roundabout today, which featured London’s first outdoor swimming pool as the main attraction of a pleasure garden in 1743, or in contrast, Gingerbread Castle in Chelsea (1910 ) with its whimsical sculpture garden privately owned by an eccentric doctor.

Curated with imagination by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, a landscape architect, historian and author of a book by the same name, there are maps, paintings, letters and photographs to help bring back memories of gardens long since overgrown or over urbanised. 

One of the most memorable was the first eco park and pond developed on derelict land adjacent to Tower Bridge in 1979 which became the William Curtis Ecological Park. 

A favourite of thousands of  inner-city school children who banded together to rescue the frogs when the park was bulldozed in 1985.  The space is now occupied by London City Hall and Potters Fields Park and so the cycle of planting and rekindling green open spaces continues with communities constantly striving to save them.

IN THE KNOW Forget garden gnomes . One eccentric, a Dr John Hunter, kept a menagerie including eagles and lions in his Earls Court garden during the late 18th century. He also kept a gun to ward away intruders hidden away in his castellated tower folly. Hardly an encouraging invitation for potential patients!