Give the lydy a flower
It may come as a surprise to those who see nothing but narrow streets and acres of rooftops that, according to the
latest Land Cover Map taken from the Landsat satellite, `over a third' of London's total land area `is semi-natural
or mown grass, tilled land and deciduous woodland'. It has always been so. One of the first delineators of
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London, Wenceslaus Hollar, was surprised by the contiguity of city and country.
His London, Viewed from Milford Stairs, View
of Lambeth from Whitehall Stairs and Tothill Fields, all dated 1644, show a city encompassed within trees and meadows
and rolling hills. His `river views' also suggest the presence of open countryside just beyond the frame of the engraving.
In the first years of the eighteenth century, pastures and open meadows began by Bloomsbury Square and Queens Square;
the buildings of Lincoln's Inn, Leicester Square and Covent Garden were surrounded by fields, while acres of pasture
and meadow still survived in the northern and eastern suburbs outside the walls. Wigmore Row and Henrietta Street
led directly into fields, while Brick Lane stopped abruptly in meadows. `World's End' beside Stepney Green was a
thoroughly rural spot, while Hyde Park was essentially part of the open countryside pressing upon the western areas
of the city.
Camden Town was well known for its `rural lanes, hedgeside roads and lovely fields' where Londonerssought `quietude and fresh air'. Wordsworth recalled the song of blackbirds and thrushes in the very heart of the
city and De Quincey found some consolation, on moonlit nights, in walking along Oxford Street and gazing up each
street `which pierces northwards through the heart of Marylebone to the fields and woods'.
From the early medieval period onward, almshouses and taverns, schools and hospitals, had their own gardens and
private orchards. The city's first chronicler, William Fitz-Stephen, noted that `the citizens of London had large
and beautiful gardens to their villas'. Stow recorded that the grand houses along the Strand had `gardens for profit'
while within the city and its liberties there were many `working gardeners' who produced `sufficient to furnish the
town with garden ware'.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gardens occupied the area between
Cornhill and Bishopsgate Street while the Minories, Goodman's Fields, Spitalfields and most of East Smithfield were
comprised of open meadows. Gardens and open ground were to be found from Cow Cross to Grays Inn Lane, as well as between
Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane. Milton, born and educated in the very centre of the city, always professed an affection
and admiration for the `garden houses' of London. His own houses in Aldersgate Street and Petty France were fine
examples of that construction, and it is said that at Petty France the poet planted a cotton-willow tree in the
garden `opening into the Park'.
Today there are many `secret gardens' within the City itself, those remnants of old churchyards resting among the
burnished buildings of modern finance. These City gardens, sometimes comprising only a few square yards of grass or
bush or tree, are unique to the capital; they have their origin in the medieval or Saxon period but, like the city itself,
they have survived many centuries of building and rebuilding. Seventy- three of them still exist, gardens of silence and
easefulness.
They can be seen as territories where the past may linger - among them, St Mary Aldermary, St Mary Outwich,
and St Peter's upon Cornhill - or perhaps their lesson can be adduced from the open Bibles in the hands of sculpted monks
in the church of St Bartholomew in Smithfield. The page to which they attend, as they congregate around the recumbent
figure of Rahere, reveals the fifty-first chapter of Isaiah. `For the Lord shall comfort Zion: He will comfort all her
waste places; and He will make her wilderness like Eden, and her desert like the garden of the Lord.'
The image of the garden haunts the imaginations of many Londoners. Among the first painted London gardens is Chiswick
from the River by Jacob Knyff. This urban garden is small in scale, and set among other houses. It is dated between
1675 and 1680; a woman walks along a gravelled path, while a gardener bends down towards the earth. They might have
appeared in the twentieth century. Albert Camus wrote, in the middle of that century, `I remember London as a city of
gardens where the birds woke me in the morning.'
In the western areas of London of the twenty-first century almost
every house either has its own garden or shares a community garden; in northern areas such as Islington and Canonbury,
and in the southern suburbs, gardens are an integral feature of the urban landscape. In that sense, perhaps, a Londoner
needs a garden in order to maintain a sense of belonging. In a city where speed and uniformity, noise and bustle, are
characteristic, and where many houses are produced to a standard design, a garden may afford the only prospect of
variety. It is also a place for recreation, contemplation and satisfaction.
The man known as `the father of English botany', William Turner, lived in Crutched Friars and was buried in
Pepys's church of St Olave's, Hart Street, in 1568. It is not at all paradoxical that the first established botanist
should be a Londoner, since the extensive fields and marshes beyond the walls were fertile ground. Turner followed the
intellectual practice of his time in not giving locations `for the 238 British plants he records for the first
time' - this is noted in the indispensable Natural History o f the City by R.S.Fitter - but it has been revealed that
one of them, the field pepperwort, was found in a garden in Coleman Street.
Another sixteenth-century botanist,
Thomas Penny, lived for twenty years in the parish of St Andrew Undershaft and collected many of his specimens in
the area beside Moorfields. The Tower ditch was also famed for its `aquatic' or water-loving plants such as flote grass
and wild celery, while a naturalist of Holborn registered wild celery from ,the fields of Holburne, neere unto
Graies inn' and vernal whitlow-grass from `the brick wall in Chauncerie Lane, belonging to the Earl of Southampton'.
Extract from “LONDON The Biography”, by Peter Ackroyd. Published by Vintage, 2001.
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