Sayes Court Park — Peter's Ruined Paradise

Sayes Court Park in London marks the site of diarist John Evelyn's seventeenth-century garden, which was notoriously vandalized in 1698 by Tsar Peter the First. Sir Christopher Wren recommended paying Evelyn 350 pounds in compensation after the six-foot-eight Tsar and his court damaged the estate. Today, a surviving 300-year-old mulberry tree stands in the park, an estate that inspired Octavia Hill to help create the National Trust.

London · from the walk “The Tsar's Deptford” · Generated

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Sayes Court Park, Grove Street, Deptford SE8

How did Tsar Peter the First damage John Evelyn's estate at Sayes Court in 1698?

Look around you. This quiet little park on Grove Street, with its tired benches and patchy grass... gives absolutely NO indication that it was once the site of one of the most spectacular gardens in all of England. And that it witnessed perhaps the wildest house party in the history of Anglo-Russian relations.

This is Sayes Court... or rather, what's Left of it.

Sayes Court once attracted throngs of visitors to its celebrated garden, created by the seventeenth-century diarist John Evelyn. For Evelyn, a garden was far more than a pleasant pastime — it was a tool for thought, a living laboratory, and an act of creation. His plans show a three-hundred-tree orchard, a formal oval garden with a bank of holly hedge, groves planted with oak, ash, beech, and chestnut, and a walled herb and kitchen garden. He poured Forty Years of his life into this paradise.

Now... in sixteen ninety-seven, Evelyn was already anxious. He'd written to a friend complaining about his tenant, Captain Benbow, saying he had "the mortification of seeing, every day, much of my former labours and expense there impairing, for want of a more polite tenant."

He had no idea what was coming.

In sixteen ninety-eight, Tsar Peter the First of Russia arrived as part of his Grand Embassy, travelling incognito under the name Peter Mikhailov. But at six feet eight inches, Peter was one of the tallest men in Europe — a fact very hard to disguise. His entourage included four chamberlains, three interpreters, seventy soldiers as tall as their monarch, four dwarves... and a monkey.

King William the Third offered him Sayes Court. The house suited Peter well because it removed him from crowded London and placed him steps from the Deptford Royal Dockyard, where a journeyman shipwright later recalled that "the Tsar of Muscovy worked with his own hands as hard as any man in the yard."

But when the work stopped... the chaos began.

All the floors were covered with grease and ink. The tiled stoves, locks, and all paintwork had to be renewed. The curtains and bed linen were torn to pieces. Every one of the fifty chairs in the house had vanished — probably burned on fires! Paintings were used as shooting targets. And Evelyn's pride and joy, that magnificent holly hedge he had lovingly cultivated for twenty years? Peter and his friends played a riotous game pushing each other Through the hedges in wheelbarrows!

The King's Surveyor, Sir Christopher Wren, was ordered to report on the damage, and recommended that Evelyn be paid three hundred and fifty pounds in compensation — equivalent to nearly fifty-eight thousand dollars today. The itemized bill famously included three pounds specifically for wheelbarrows broken by the Czar.

And yet... here's the twist. The shipbuilding knowledge Peter brought back to Russia helped change the country. He established a massive naval program in the Baltic that, by his death in seventeen twenty-five, had twenty-eight thousand men enlisted in a navy of nearly fifty large ships and over eight hundred smaller vessels. Evelyn's ruined garden helped birth the Russian Navy.

Now look for the old mulberry tree in this park — in twenty seventeen, that three-hundred-year-old mulberry was nominated for the Woodland Trust's Tree of the Year award. Some say Peter planted it. Though given what happened during his visit, it seems far more likely Evelyn himself planted it earlier... and it was simply a lucky survivor.

One more thing. This very place, now completely buried beneath Convoys Wharf and Sayes Court Park, was a key factor in the creation of the National Trust. It was the predicament of Sayes Court that inspired campaigners OctAvia Hill and Robert Hunter to create the National Trust — though, ironically, they never managed to save This garden.

So remember... you're standing where a Russian tsar rode wheelbarrows through hedgerows, where England's greatest diarist wept over his ruined paradise, and where a battered mulberry tree still clings to life... the Only living witness to it all.

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