The Garden's History 

Eccleston Square Garden is a multi-award-winning garden which came into being in the early part of the nineteenth century, in an area that was originally a fertile market garden on the Thames flood plain, producing up to four crops a year, due to the plentiful local supply of horse manure, common in the era before fossil fuel cars.

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In 1825, Thomas Cubitt was contracted by Lord Grosvenor to develop South Belgravia, now Pimlico, under a leasing system. Part of the agreement was to build a series of garden squares 'to let a little of the countryside into the town'. Alternative land was found for the nurserymen, who had been farming the area, and they moved to Lincolnshire. The ensuing development of the railways enabled their vegetables to be transported from there to London.

 

The three-acre Eccleston Square Garden was laid out at the beginning of the 1830s, with the first houses on the square (1-3) built by 1836, followed by numbers 4 and 5 in 1842, and then the rest of the square was completed by 1850. The freehold of the land was owned by the Grosvenor family, who also owned an estate in Eccleston, Cheshire, from where it is thought the square takes its name; however, eventually, the Pimlico section of the Grosvenor Estate was sold by the second Duke of Westminster in the 1950s to pay taxes, and freeholds to the houses in the square were sold to individual small property companies and many houses were converted into flats. The freehold of the garden was also sold, although it was still run by the garden committee, and in the early 1980s the freeholder proposed to sell the garden freehold to a company that wanted to build a carpark beneath the garden. Outrage ensued and this proposal was challenged by the Garden Committee, spearheaded by Avril Zaniboni and Roger Phillips, who galvanised local residents to fund a campaign that saw off this threat and subsequently bought the freehold of the land. The square is now owned and held in trust in perpetuity for the use of residents as a garden and is run by the Eccleston Square Garden Board.

 

In October 1987, Eccleston Square Garden was badly hit by the Great Storm, a tornado with wind speeds of up to 90–100 miles an hour, that ravaged Britain and destroyed two million trees across the nation. Seventeen trees came down in Eccleston Square, including seven, 150-year-old London plane trees, tearing up the existing planting and grassed areas, and destroying large sections of the square railings. The Garden Committee called an EGM, which was attended by over 100 residents, and a one-off special garden rate was agreed to raise the necessary funds to restore the garden. Since then, the Garden Committee has maintained a substantial capital reserve to help cover any further natural disasters.

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From 1981, Roger Phillips, MBE, was the honorary garden manager, and he was instrumental in designing and re-planting the garden, while maintaining the original Cubitt plan. He ensured that the soil quality was improved and concentrated on introducing a wonderful array of new and unusual plants into the garden, developing important collections of ceanothus, camellias, tree peonies and climbing and rambling roses, including many special and rare species, suited to the garden's unique microclimate, which is created by the fact that the garden is sheltered by the houses around the square, so frosts are rare and there is much summer warmth.

 

Sadly, Roger died in 2021, but his legacy is of an outstanding garden, which is maintained and further developed by Pavel Votapek, with whom Roger worked closely in the years before his death.

 

If you wish to find out more about the garden and Roger's work, please read Roger's book entitled The 3,000-mile Garden. It is an exchange of letters between him and the American cookery writer Leslie Land, in which they talk about their respective gardens: Eccleston Square Garden, and Lesley’s garden in Maine.