Archive for November 2011
Last, best hope for peace.
It is not as much of a secret garden as it likes to think it is, if only because those navigating central London by tall buildings will likely stumble across it. But it always feels empty. A sense of quiet, even on its busiest lunchtime.
Out the back of Seven Dials, and a few steps away from the modernisation wrought on Tottenham Court Road (whither Dionysus ) the Phoenix garden is a bit of London that never really got over the last great war. For forty years it served as a car park (itself a hidden gem, I imagine, for those who knew where to find it). And now it is the last of the unnecessarily repetitive Covent Garden Community Gardens.
A haven from the four scourges of modern life. The garden even has an eighteenth-century, Palladian-type church to complete the illusion.
That you can rent it out for the day somehow seems to miss the point.
