The Garden at 120: London's Secret Rooftop Nobody Books

The Garden at 120 is a free public rooftop garden situated 65 metres above 120 Fenchurch Street in London, offering panoramic views without advance tickets. Designed by Latz and Partner and opened on 15 February 2019, the 15th-floor space features 85 Italian wisteria trees, over 30 fruit trees, and a 200-foot water feature. Beneath the building lie Roman archaeological remains dating from 50 AD to 410 AD.

London Β· from the walk β€œLondon Through the Eyes of a Black Cab Driver” Β· audio ~4 min Β· Generated

120 Fenchurch Street, London EC3M 5BA

When did The Garden at 120 in London open to the public?

Right. Now I'll look up one more thing about the archaeological finds beneath 120 Fenchurch Street β€” the Roman discoveries are fascinating cabbie material.......... Now here's something most people walk right past. You're standing at one hundred and twenty Fenchurch Street... and right above your head, fifteen floors up, is London's best-kept secret viewpoint. No booking. No tickets. No queue. Completely free. And yet most Londoners have Never heard of it.......... See, any cabbie worth their salt knows the real London isn't where the tourists go. While everyone's fighting for timed tickets at the Sky Garden in that big ugly building down the road β€” the one we call the Walkie Talkie β€” you can just stroll in here, go through a quick bag check, step into a lift, and... sixty five metres later... you're in the largest public rooftop garden in the City of London.......... The garden was designed by German landscape architects Latz and Partner, and it's home to eighty five Italian wisteria trees, over thirty fruit trees, and a two hundred foot long flowing water feature. It opened on the fifteenth of February, twenty nineteen. And here's the beautiful thing β€” the space is limited to just two hundred people, and the sheer "little known" nature of the roof means that few people visit at any one time.......... Now, speaking of the Walkie Talkie... every cabbie in London remembers twenty thirteen. A ray of light reflected by the Walkie Talkie building melted parts of a Jaguar XJ parked in a nearby street! Sky News managed to fry an egg in the glare. We started calling it the Walkie Scorchie. In twenty fifteen, the building won the Carbuncle Cup for the worst new building in the UK. From up on this rooftop, you can look right at that building and have a quiet laugh about it.......... But here's the deeper story, the one that gives this place real weight. The ground beneath your feet has layers. The archaeological potential of this site was enormous β€” it sits within Roman Londinium, less than a hundred metres from the Roman Forum. Excavations confirmed Roman archaeology surviving below the concrete, with features dating from fifty AD all the way through to four ten AD. Over time, a small cremation cemetery emerged here. Archaeologists unearthed three cremation burials and an inhumation. You're standing above nearly two Thousand years of continuous London history.......... And at street level, just next to the entrance, there's something most people miss entirely. A sculpture called the Gilt of Cain, by Michael Visocchi with poetry by Lemn Sissay, was unveiled by Archbishop Desmond Tutu on the fourth of September, two thousand and eight. The work comprises seventeen granite columns shaped like sugarcane stems, but they also suggest a group of people β€” a congregation, a group of buyers at an auction, or even the enslaved people offered for sale. The title is a triple pun... gilt as in gold, or guilt. Cain as in the biblical killer, or cane, from which sugar is made.......... Why Here, of all places? Because the nearby church, Saint Mary Woolnoth, had a rector from seventeen eighty to eighteen oh seven named John Newton β€” a former slave trader who became a fierce advocate for abolition and inspired William Wilberforce himself. That same John Newton... wrote Amazing Grace.......... So next time someone asks a cabbie for the best view in London, the smart ones don't say the Shard, and they don't say the London Eye. They bring you Here. A secret garden in the sky, sitting on top of Roman bones and the conscience of an empire.

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