The London Town Garden, 1700-1840

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

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Review

The glories of the English landscape heritage in the 18th Century are much celebrated in garden literature.  Much too is known about London’s characteristic terraced houses with their simple dignity and economical use of space.  Yet accounts of the gardens which lie before and behind them have until now been overlooked.

In this interesting study, Todd Longstaffe-Gowan argues that little has changed in London gardens in 300 hundred years.  Small, flat, infertile and inhospitable enclosures still prevail and attempts at individuality still rely upon chance circumstances of limited vistas and the grateful inclusion of any distant topographical or architectural feature.

The development of London as a whole has been well documented by Simon Jenkins in Landlords to London and more recently in Peter Thorold’s excellent The London Rich: The Creation Of A Great City From 1666 To The Present , in which we learn of the appearance of the first gardens and open spaces, following the migration of the grandees from the City westwards.  Covent Garden was the first residential garden square.  Land confiscated during the Dissolution of the Monasteries was granted by Royal charter to the 1st Earl Russell in 1552 and was later developed by the 4th Earl as the first speculative development with a formal open space.  Thereafter, every time a square was laid out in the West End, London gained yet another mark of sophistication and as ducal and other noble investors followed suit, a network of terraces evolved, with public areas fore and private gardens aft.

Practitioners such as Joseph Spence and later, John Claudius Loudon provided ideas from what were essentially pattern books of garden design after French and Dutch models where urban gardens had a more established tradition.  Few examples survive intact today, but the Officers’ Terrace at Chatham Dockyard is remarkably faithful to contemporary drawings and an extant wooden model.  Enterprising nurserymen like Thomas Fairchild, whose early success in hybridisation is wittily celebrated in The Ingenious Mr Fairchild , provided a increasingly varied array of plants form Hoxton, Knightsbridge and Kensington, to satisfy the burgeoning enthusiasm of the gardening public.  The private garden became for the first time a common expectation and this new phenomenon, coinciding as it did with a new social outlook began to have an economic effect on the expanding conurbation.  Staff was required to tend these plots and a form of indenture was created, sometimes known as ‘places together’, usually entailing ‘a gardener and his wife; the man to look after the gardens and the woman to dress the victuals, or get up the linen etc.’

Author Longstaffe-Gowan draws our attention to one garden in particular, which is of significant account in this survey due to the extensive documentation which has survived.  Francis Douce (1757-1834) was one of the most eminent antiquaries and bibliophiles of his age whose interest in horticulture was first aroused by his friend, essayist and travel writer Richard Twiss.  Twiss supplied designs for Douce’s garden at Upper Gower Street in Bloomsbury, as well as plants and copious enthusiastic notes, with philosophical references ranging from Pliny the Elder to Voltaire, in what is a moving testament to friendship and an unrivalled account of the gardening principles of the era.

By the beginning of the 19th Century, the collective significance of urban gardens and civic squares had become a defining feature and part of the ethos of the metropolis, with some of the greatest names in landscape design turning their attention from the countryside to the city.  Practitioners such as Thomas Johnes and Humphrey Repton were induced by the lure of royal patronage to collaborate with John Nash on the development in Marylebone which we now know as Regent’s Park and which dominated and inspired subsequent practice in London and elsewhere.

This is a remarkable book.  The current vogue in gardening literature is for gaudy photographs and minimal content.  In what has obviously been a labour of love, Longstaffe-Gowan bucks this trend and gives us a wonderful survey of this important but somehow neglected subject, with plans and drawings supplementing a scholarly but highly readable text. - review by Stewart Grimshaw