- Hardcover: 298 pages
- Publisher: Yale University Press; 1st edition edition (1 Mar 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0300085389
- ISBN-13: 978-0300085389
- Product Dimensions: 28 x 22.6 x 3.2 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 994,944 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Londoners love their gardens, those pocket-sized patches of countryside that make the city bearable. The London Town Garden traces that love affair from the formal squares and private gardens of Georgian London, which for the first time brought the countryside into town. It concludes in the 1840s, as an explosion of house building doubled the size of the city, but with every suburban villa still having its little patch of green. Look at the book's aerial plans of the city, such as John Strype's 1720 plan of Westminster, and the striking thing is not so much the buildings as the spaces behind them. Every house has its garden tucked away. And it's these secret gardens that fascinate Longstaffe-Gowan. We can all walk in Soho Square or St James's Park, but what treasures, follies and exotic plants lurk in those hidden gardens? Most of the gardens reflect the formality we now only see in the preserved Georgian grounds of stately homes--with a love of order and geometric shapes totally alien to our modern notions of mixed meadows, fruit and vegetables, and wild flowers. The rule was "hierarchy, symmetry and regularity", as the Georgians were subjugating nature rather than letting it grow free. But there were fertile kitchen gardens too--in the early 1800s fruit and vegetable gardens "abounded in Marylebone, Bloomsbury, Piccadilly and Hoxton". And William Bentham was growing "the finest looking and most delicious nectarines" in his Gower Street garden. There were armies of professional gardeners drawing up plans for new homeowners, and their schedules and invoices make fascinating reading. Richard Twiss's estimate for planting out a garden in Gower Street in 1791 showed it wasn't a cheap business either, with a bill of £12, 7s, 6d for flowers, including "two or three guineas on bulbs, such as hyacinths, tulips, iris, peony, crocus and snowdrop". Just as we do today, the Georgians and Victorians were making their gardens "an extension of indoor space and the domestic topography"--another room of the house, in fact. The London Town Garden offers a fascinating glimpse into those secret rooms. --John Rennie
Product Description
Much has been written about London's terraced houses with their simple dignity, their economical use of space and their sense of comfort and human scale. Yet the small gardens that lie before or behind the houses in this great city have until now been overlooked. In this groundbreaking account of the development of the private garden in London, eminent garden historian Todd Longstaffe-Gowan provides a delightful remedy to the oversight. Recognising the contribution of modest domestic gardens to the texture of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London, Longstaffe-Gowan explores in detail the small gardens, their owners and their significance to the development of the metropolis. Some two hundred illustrations enhance this rich and fascinating discussion. Town gardening was conventionally maligned as a trifling pursuit conducted within inhospitable and infertile enclosures. This view changed during the eighteenth century as middle class Londoners found in gardening activities an outlet for personal enjoyment and expression. This book describes how gardening affected the lives of many, becoming part of the ritual of the daily round and gratifying material aspirations. Longstaffe-Gowan charts how the private garden became for the first time a common expectation, how the rise of town gardening coincided with new social and economic views, how temporary fanciful gardens became popular, how gardens in the city related to suburban gardens and much more about the origins and growth of domestic gardens in London. Todd Longstaffe-Gowan is a landscape architect in private practice in London. He is gardens adviser to Hampton Court Palace and has worked as a landscape architect on the conservation of historic parks and gardens and the design of new landscapes in Britain, on the Continent and in the West Indies.
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