Speculation and ‘the Rural Manner’

Posted on 03/10/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Last week I discussed the origins of London squares and looked at the earliest examples.   Today I’m going to look at what happened after the Great Fire of 1666  when the balance of the city’s population shifted to the suburbs and particularly to the western ones  where air pollution was less severe.   It coincided with the withering away of royal control over building licences  so that landowners became free to capitalise on their estates almost at whim.      This quickly led to a speculative building boom in which  landowners leased sites to speculative builders, usually for 99 years at a low ground rent,  who did the dirty work and took the risks.  The result was that the new squares and their adjacent terraced streets became the foundations for the shape of modern London.  

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Last week I discussed the origins of London squares and looked at the earliest examples.   Today I’m going to look at what happened after the Great Fire of 1666  when the balance of the city’s population shifted to the suburbs and particularly to the western ones  where air pollution was less severe.   It coincided with the withering away of royal control over building licences  so that landowners became free to capitalise on their estates almost at whim.      This quickly led to a speculative building boom in which  landowners leased sites to speculative builders, usually for 99 years at a low ground rent,  who did the dirty work and took the risks.  The result was that the new squares and their adjacent terraced streets became the foundations for the shape of modern London.  

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Before the Square

Posted on 26/09/2020 by The Garden History Blog

 

I’m often asked to talk about the history of London’s squares and I always wonder what causes this almost endless fascination.  Of course there’s no doubt that, as the London Gardens Trust says,  “squares are one of the defining features of London. Like other European cities, London has its grand civic spaces, but no other city has developed the garden square in quite the same way.”

They have survived changes in taste and style, war and reconstruction and all the vicissitudes of finance and management problems. I suspect that is largely due to their spatial integrity which has  largely remained intact despite  the street scene changing drastically over the past 400 years.  We have seen buildings refaced, redeveloped or replaced, trees, shrubs, paths, lighting, and railings have come and gone,  but despite everything the successful combination of architecture and horticulture has somehow survived.

Over the next few weeks I’m going to look at London squares and their history beginning today with  “where did the idea for a square come from?”

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Kensington goes Italian

Posted on 19/09/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Last week I wrote the background story of the Royal Horticultural Society’s magnificent but short-lived gardens in South Kensington, and today I want to follow up with an account of the gardens themselves designed by William Andrews Nesfield.

When I sat down to write this I wasn’t sure where to start or how to go about describing such an enormous space that was at once doubly simple and complex. Simple in that the overall design is visible almost  in a glance, but complex in that each section is very elaborate in detail,  and while simple in terms of planting  it is complex in its overall content.

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Andrew Murray & the Lost Gardens of Kensington

Posted on 12/09/2020 by The Garden History Blog

Who was Andrew Murray I can hear you asking and how did he lose a garden, especially one in Kensington?  Well, of course he didn’t actually personally  lose the garden, but he did record it before it was lost.  A Scottish lawyer and natural historian Murray  held a variety of posts before becoming the assistant secretary of the Royal Horticultural Society between 1860 and 1865. Although its quite hard for us to imagine, the RHS was once thought incapable of running a garden, or at least of running a garden that didn’t lose money hand over fist.

The lost garden of the title – more than 22 acres of prime real estate in Kensington – was planned to be their financial salvation  and it opened  to great acclaim in 1861 with an extraordinary collection of buildings, canals, statuary and embroidered parterres. However it didn’t solve the society’s money problems or even pay its way, so after some acrimonious court cases the RHS was evicted and the gardens built over less than 40 years later.

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Hollyhocks

Posted on 05/09/2020 by The Garden History Blog

 

Some flowers – like tulips, peonies or roses – are important or famous enough  to have their stories told in books that make the best seller list. But while some others have champions who’ve written about them, or are the subject of serious monographs there are some other well-known flowers that don’t seem to have attracted that much attention.  One of them is that stalwart of the cottage garden the hollyhock.

Do you even know where they come from?  When they arrived in Britain?  Why was Darwin interested in them?  Do they actually have  a history that’s worth knowing?   And why did Emma Townsend, writing in the Independent call them  “the Laura Ashley curtains of the gardening world, dangerously blowsy and 10 years out of date.”  and say “you certainly won’t catch anyone using them in a garden at oh-so-modern Chelsea.”

Read on to find out…

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