Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden
Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden in Vauxhall, London, is a lush community garden created on a World War II Blitz bomb site that was transformed in 1994 through local squatter activism and landscape designer Dan Pearson. Following widespread squatting in the 1980s, local residents formed a garden association led by Evan English to secure funding. The site includes tropical vegetation and an 1860s industrial metal wheel from a demolished marble factory.
London · from the walk “Secrets of Vauxhall: Spies, Pleasure & Hidden London” · audio ~3 min · Generated
Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden, Bonnington Square, London SW8 1TE
- Seven Victorian houses built in the 1870s were destroyed on the site during the World War II Blitz.
- Over 300 squatters occupied Bonnington Square in the early 1980s, creating a volunteer-run café and community garden.
- Resident Evan English formed the Bonnington Square Garden Association to secure funding and begin construction in August 1994.
- Landscape designer Dan Pearson helped redesign Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden while living alongside it in the early 1990s.
- An 1860s metal wheel rescued from a nearby marble factory stands inside Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden.
How was a World War II bomb site in London transformed into Bonnington Square Pleasure Garden?
Look around you. Tropical palms, winding mosaic paths, bamboo, banana plants... You'd think you were somewhere in the Mediterranean. But you're standing in Vaux-hall, south London... on a World War Two bomb site.......... How did a crater left by the Blitz become one of London's most extraordinary secret gardens?......... The story begins in the eighteen seventies, when these Victorian houses were built for railway workers. But many railway workers preferred a pension and to pay for their own homes, so the cottages were soon sold off as conventional housing. Then came the bombs. Seven houses on this very spot were destroyed during the war, leaving nothing but rubble and weeds.......... For decades, the gap just... sat there. The council installed a set of swings and a couple of seats in the seventies but neglected the upkeep. The whole square was falling apart. By the late nineteen seventies, Bonnington Square was compulsorily purchased by the Greater London Council, which intended to demolish it entirely to build a new school.......... And here's where it gets extraordinary. A single Turkish shopkeeper in one of the buildings managed to prevent the demolition through legal means... buying just enough time for something remarkable to happen. A disparate crew of travelling hippies and wandering anarchists, many from New Zealand, brought their Diy communal ethos to London in the early nineteen eighties. They squatted the empty houses. At one point, there were over three hundred people squatting in the area!......... These weren't people just passing through. The squatters established a volunteer-run vegetarian café, a community garden, a bar, a nightclub, and a wholefoods shop. They called the place "Squatty Bonny."
...... Then in nineteen ninety, a threat appeared. A builder working in the area applied to the council to use this bomb site as storage... which woke everybody up to the danger of losing it forever. The Bonnington Square Garden Association, led by resident Evan English, was set up to lobby the council for money to create a community garden. After prolonged negotiations, money became available from a joint Government and Local Council scheme, and construction began in August nineteen ninety four.......... Now, here's a detail most people miss. For five years in the early nineties, the celebrated landscape designer Dan Pearson lived in a flat overlooking this very park, and helped redesign it. The same Dan Pearson who would go on to design gardens for Roppongi Hills in Tokyo and restore the grounds of Althorp House after Princess DiAna's death.......... And see that enormous metal wheel at the far end of the garden? That's a classic piece of Industrial Revolution art dating from the eighteen sixties. It was rescued from a nearby marble factory that was under demolition just as this garden was being built. A relic of one world, saved to anchor another.......... The garden's name is, of course, partly in homage to the original Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which existed just one hundred meters to the north and were a major feature of London for three centuries. So in a way, the tradition of pleasure and spectacle never really left this patch of earth. It just... went underground for a while.