Bonnington Square: The Jungle Neighbourhood
Bonnington Square in London is an 1870s Victorian residential square that was saved from demolition by 1980s squatters and transformed into a tropical community garden district. On 14 October 1940, Blitz bombing destroyed seven homes on the site, which Lambeth Council later attempted to clear. In 1994, local residents led by Evan English secured funding to establish the Pleasure Garden, featuring a salvaged 1860s marble factory wheel.
London · from the walk “Secrets of Vauxhall: Spies, Pleasure & Hidden London” · audio ~3 min · Generated
Bonnington Square, London SW8 1TF
- Built in the 1870s for railway workers, Bonnington Square lost seven houses to Blitz bombs on 14 October 1940.
- Squatters from New Zealand completely occupied Bonnington Square in the early 1980s, opening a volunteer-run vegetarian cafe.
- Evan English led the Bonnington Square Garden Association, securing funding in 1994 to build the public Pleasure Garden.
- A housing cooperative purchased Bonnington Square's buildings from Lambeth Council in 1998 after decades of squatting.
How did squatters save Bonnington Square in London from demolition?
Look around you. Vines creeping up Victorian brickwork... bamboo rustling overhead... banana plants stretching toward grey London skies. This is Bonnington Square, and it shouldn't exist.......... These terraced houses were built in the eighteen seventies, neat rows of London brick for the workers at Nine Elms Goods Yard, the great railway depot nearby. Charles Booth's famous poverty map marked this square as "mixed... some comfortable, others poor." Not fashionable. Not grand. Just hardworking families scrubbing their front steps each morning.......... Then came the Blitz. On the fourteenth of October, nineteen forty, bombs tore through the heart of the square, destroying seven houses and killing two residents. The gap they left would sit empty for decades... a wound in the streetscape that refused to heal.......... By the late nineteen seventies, the whole square was in terrible shape. The Greater London Council swooped in with a compulsory purchase order, planning to flatten everything and build an extension for the Lillian Bayliss School. Residents were leaving. Demolition seemed certain. But then... one shopkeeper changed everything. A single trader in one of the buildings fought the demolition through legal means, buying just enough time for something extraordinary to happen.......... Squatters began pouring in. And these weren't just drifters. Many came from New Zealand, bringing a fierce do-it-yourself communal spirit. By the early nineteen eighties, the square was Completely occupied. They built a volunteer-run vegetarian café... a wholefoods shop... a nightclub! Even a bar. The café started because most squatters didn't have functioning kitchens, so they simply fed each other.......... And the names who passed through here? John Lydon of the Sex Pistols. The Jesus and Mary Chain. It became a genuine artistic melting pot.......... In nineteen ninety, a local builder nearly destroyed the dream by applying to use the old bomb site for storage. This accidentally alerted Lambeth Council that they owned the land. But the residents fought back Again, forming the Bonnington Square Garden Association led by Evan English. They secured funding in nineteen ninety-four and created what you see today... the Pleasure Garden, named as a loving tribute to the famous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens that stood just a hundred metres north of here for three centuries.......... The designers drew inspiration from Operation Green Thumb community gardens on New York's Lower East Side. Look for the giant metal wheel near the back... it was salvaged from a nearby marble factory dating to the eighteen sixties, rescued just as that building was being demolished.......... In nineteen ninety-eight, the housing cooperative finally purchased these buildings from Lambeth Council. Former squats now sell for over a million pounds. But here's what truly matters... this jungle, this impossible green paradise, grew from a bomb crater and the stubbornness of people who simply refused to let a neighbourhood die.