This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

---

Has any nation ever felt humanity’s expulsion from Eden more keenly than the English? Exiles in Metroland, in towns and cities, they trudge around the countryside and the parks of stately homes, pining after the lost paradise. With wistful fanaticism, they cultivate lawns and flowerbeds in the tiniest and least propitious of spaces. 

The war between city and greenery is eternal. The concrete and asphalt, like a voracious amoeba, seeks open land to engulf.

As with everything else, London is naturally the epicentre of this elemental struggle. As it splurged outwards in the 17th and 18th centuries, gobbling up fields and villages, greenness was preserved in its heart by the gardens of the wealthy, the Royal parks, the visions of speculative developers and architects factoring bosky garden squares into their prospectuses. 

South of the river there always lay an enjoyable, disreputable playground where normal rules did not apply, with moated whorehouses, bear-gardens, the ramshackle beginnings of what would turn into the pleasure-grounds of the Georgians — even a botanic garden where Waterloo now stands — before they were all swallowed up by the railways and Pooterish habitats of the Victorians.

The current state of play in this ongoing battle is charted in a new exhibition at the Garden Museum in Lambeth, running until March, and an accompanying book, Lost Gardens of London, by Todd Longstaffe-Gowan (Modern Art Press, £25). For the most part it’s a rather delightful story, a tussle between competing and overlapping interests which, whilst no doubt always tending to the greater victory of the Great Wen, has its upbeat sides. 

Inevitably, though, it ends grimly with the wanton destruction of St James’ Gardens beside Euston in 2023, for the pitifully botched HS2, which seems never likely to get anywhere near there, guttering out instead in another wasteland somewhere beyond Wormwood Scrubs.

As with the actual Eden, many of London’s vanished gardens teemed with exciting and occasionally alarming wildlife. In the 1760s, Dr John Hunter began to develop his “animated garden” at Earl’s Court House, opposite where the Tube station now stands. 

Hunter, who enjoyed harnessing up his buffaloes to trot them through the streets of London, dreamed of a paradise where the lion would lie down with the lamb, though he kept his actual leopards wisely cooped up in a sort of mini-fortress at the back of the grounds — and the lions seem to have been made of stone. Still, his ostrich rubbed shoulders with a zebra, a shawl goat from the East Indies, a jackal, bats, snakes and birds of prey in an early instance of the vibrant diversity we so prize nowadays.

Over by Oxford Street, Joshua Brookes — one of a dynasty of eccentric animal-fanciers — created a picturesque mini-mountain out of off-cuts of the Rock of Gibraltar. There he housed his eagle and “several smaller rapacious birds” — not that much smaller, in truth, since they included a vulture and an ossifrage. 

The construction also featured a sort of moat full of fish and was topped by a “Jet d’Eau” emerging from the mouth of an “antique head of a large animal nearly resembling that of an ichthyosaurus”, plus the obligatory hermit’s cell buried somewhere in its depths. 

These gardens were open to students and fashionable visitors on a regular basis, but for the early Victorians there was one place in particular to flaunt your fashionable new outfit amidst exotic plants and animals. As you navigate the colourful binscape of South London streets you come upon a pleasant little space called Pasley Park, tucked away behind Kennington tube. This is all that remains of the Surrey Zoological Gardens, laid out in 1831 by Edward Cross, keeper of the capital’s largest exotic animal emporium at Exeter Change, with the botanist Henry Phillips. 

Animals and plants clamoured for attention in “the most attractive lounge in or near the metropolis”, a 14-acre site where Victorians of all classes would decorously mingle. Brookes’ Eagle Rock made a reappearance here, amidst other excitements like the Tortoise’s Grotto and a central glasshouse where lions would roam, pointedly eyeing some rather nervous caged birds. 

But what set Surrey Gardens apart were the “Stupendous Panoramic Models” laid on, vast piles of canvas-covered timber constructions, ingeniously painted to create animated spectacles of exploding volcanoes, the Passage of the Alps by Napoleon, the Siege of Gibraltar, the Temple of Elora. 

Terrific pyrotechnic spectacles were laid on at dusk — “the most novel and extraordinary Pyro-Scenic Display ever imagined! The advance of the Fire God on his Floating Throne of Flaming Dragons … ” — using the landscaped grounds and lake with all the energy, inventiveness and chutzpah of the age: merely compare Westminster Council’s less than breathtaking Mound at Marble Arch, shamefacedly dismantled after a few months, for the wretched visions we dream in the 21st century.

In respectable form, those Surrey Gardens continued the tradition of the transfluvial lands as a playground beyond the reach of metropolitan rules — as if the Thames were the Styx, the plains of Southwark and Walworth a somewhat rackety Elysian Fields where you might catch a glimpse of the dance of the blessed spirits. 

The stews and bawds of Southwark were celebrated from the 12th century, and, by the 15th, the domain of Paris, or “Parish Gardyn”, covered a hundred acres, a Cythaera with its own landing stage where adepts of beauty and pleasure could disembark into a land of pastures, orchards and meadows. At the centre of Paris Gardens stood the celebrated Leaguer, a place of multiple entertainments run by Elizabeth Holland — or “Dona Britanica Hollandia the Arch-Mistris of the wicked women of Europia” — a fortified, moated mansion set in extensive gardens. 

Things had become a bit less colourful by the time of Surrey Gardens, of course, for which we have to thank Jonathan Tyers, the impresario of Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, their immediate predecessor in time. Anybody with the requisite sixpence (later a shilling) was allowed in, except for liveried servants, whose presence was thought likely to encourage segregation. 

The entertainment was polite, with pastoral ditties by Thomas Arne and Handel (whose lovely, relaxed statue by Louis-François Roubiliac was the centrepiece of the gardens and is now in the V&A) diverting the higher-toned as they dined in the pavilions decorated by William Hogarth and Francis Hayman. But there were still shady walks and bushy bowers where more vivid excitement might be created.

Tyers bought the lands in 1729, just when nascent English culture was properly breaking away from the Continent and triumphantly asserting its own energetic, youthful identity. Vauxhall was a revolution in the history of entertainment: the first gardens of the type in Europe, where music, dancing, eating and drinking took place beneath the wonders of hundreds of lights twinkling in the trees. 

Tyers’ pull was such that he wangled the triumphant premiere of Handel’s Fireworks music a few days before the (disastrous) official performance in Green Park: eight thousand came for that, and there was a three-hour traffic jam over London Bridge.

The remnants of Vauxhall Gardens are uninspiring now and flanked with allotments where tomatoes and sunflowers strain towards the sky, themselves harking back to William Curtis’ nearby Botanic Gardens on Lambeth Marsh, which opened in 1771. 

One of Vauxhall’s demotic imitators in Mile End, the New Globe, was sold off and developed into streets in the 1860s, but now the site is home to the largest urban park to be created since the 19th century. And as you wander through the city you find a myriad little spaces transformed into miniature jungles, botanic gardens, oases: the Phoenix Garden by Shaftesbury Avenue, Brown Hart Gardens in Mayfair above the old electricity station, the Culpeper Community Garden in Islington, the New River and a hundred more.

Of course, such little victories are always provisional. Another notable defeat was the modernist garden of the old Commonwealth Institute, now a warren of absentee-plutocrat flats by the disastrous Design Museum. But sometimes the Lord grudgingly giveth back, as with the “linear park” from Vauxhall to Battersea through the dystopian clusters of random new tower blocks that disfigure the river skyline thanks to our recent mayors. Well, let’s see how that one works out. 

Whatever happens, London will continue to sprout greenery in the unlikeliest spots, even as other little paradises are drowned beneath the concrete deluge.