Gardens Matter

LPGT Chairman Chris Sumner writes:

Amid the committee meetings, emails and deadlines, it is quite easy to lose sight of why we are all in this game, which is because we like and enjoy parks and gardens and think that they matter.

I am interested in history and design and also like plants, and I enjoy gardens at all sorts of levels. It interests me that a plant was first collected in the wild in New England in the seventeenth century, or in the foothills of the Himalayas in the nineteenth; that knowledge for me adds to the appeal of the plant, and the fact that it has been growing happily for hundreds of years and looking at home thousands of miles from its native site increases its romance. That is not to say that 1 like all plants; heathers are fine on Scottish hi I hillsides and Surrey heaths but elsewhere they leave me cold; and while there are many good reasons to visit Wakehurst Place, the prospect of seeing the national collection of skimmias is not for me one of them. Orchids growing on a steep roadside bank in Devon are lovely, but their exotic cousins massed in greenhouses can only impress me without my liking them one bit.

Parks, and the effect on parks of proposed developments, continue to make headlines in the London papers. On 18th February one of the Trust's patrons Hal Moggridge presented the Garden History Society's keynote lecture at the Royal Horticultural Society on Views - Perception and Conservation of Iconic Urban Skylines. Hal gave evidence on behalf of the Royal Parks at the Public Inquiry into the infamous Doon Street proposal (see articles for details) and continues to fight for the application of civilized standards in assessing the impact of tall developments on important city park and river views.

Current threats include the Elizabeth House development (aka "the Three Ugly Sisters") in York Road, Waterloo, which will obtrude into views from the Westminster World Heritage Site, Parliament Square and St James's Park, and the Three Houses Project ("the Breadsticks") at London Bridge. If the photomontages are to be believed, at 250m-high, these will look pretty horrible from nearly everywhere, an outsize three-fingered glove gesturing at London and Londoners. For comparison, SwissRe ("the Gherkin") is 180m high, and has at least the architectural virtue of symmetry.

The financial recession may ensure that some of these schemes won't get built for a while, if ever, but the granting of planning permission sets the marker and creates an inflated site value for the future. It can't make much financial sense at the moment to develop the Jolly Boatman site opposite Hampton Court Palace, where planning permission has now been granted for an over-large and tired-looking neo- Georgian hotel, so the prominent riverside site will very likely continue to be an eyesore for years to come.

At the annual meeting of the Thames Landscape Strategy - Hampton to Kew's at Kew on 11th February, Sir Simon Milton, Deputy Mayor of London for Policy and Planning and adviser to Boris Johnson, gave a generally encouraging speech about the Mayor's attitude to the River Thames, tall buildings and the Strategic View from King Henry's Mound to St Paul's Cathedral; but Boris Johnson's failure to intervene in the cases of Doon Street, the Beetham Tower, and the York Road site does make one wonder whether in practice he will be any more enlightened than his notoriously Philistine predecessor.