Tuesday 12 September 2017

High above the High Street



There is a place that feels like it should not exist. Well, OK, I suppose there are many places that feel like they should not exit, but the one I am thinking of is the Roof Gardens high above Kensington High Street. I had been there several years before, for a work dinner, and at the time had been astonished by the place. A few months ago, whilst visiting the new Design Museum in Kensington, I decided to pay it another visit, and was not disappointed. To enter this strange world, you have to present yourself at a reception desk behind a door up a side street, and provide some ID. By and large, you don't have to book, and entrance is free. After signing in, you are pointed towards a lift lined with pictures of flamingos, and are sent to the top of the building.

When you emerge, you are in a somewhat anonymous corridor, but after wandering around a little, you emerge into the daylight where you may find yourself, miraculously, in a Spanish garden, a medieval courtyard, or an English woodland. All six stories up, beside a busy London thoroughfare. The unreality of the place brings to mind the original film Westworld, and from certain angles, you could easily be forgiven for believing you were in Grenada, or the grounds of a well-preserved Tudor mansion. Only the spire of St Mary Abbots church peeking out over the moorish colonnade, perhaps, gives the game away.

The gardens opened to the public in May 1938, having been built over the course of two. The original idea came from Trevor Bowen, the vice president of John Barker & Co., the original owners of the building on which the gardens sit. He hired the landscape architect Ralph Hancock to turn his idea into reality, which Hancock did to incredible effect. Appropriately enough, although they take a little finding, being hidden away in one corder of the woodland garden beside a quirky 1930s house, there are plaques to both gentlemen, commemorating their work.

The garden is not just an oasis of calm in a busy city, although it assuredly is this; it is also a miniature wildlife garden. Walking from the Tudor garden to the woodland, past natural-looking ponds (six floors up, remember) you are likely to come face to beak with the flamingos pictured in the lift, along with a variety of exotic ducks. On a bright, quiet, weekday morning, I walked around this delightful folly, which I had largely to myself, and felt like I had travelled to another world.

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