Hill Garden and Pergola

High romance hidden on the Heath

Marco Kesseler

Recalling a hilltop redoubt from a lost civilisation, this huge pergola snakes for 800 feet along a little-visited hillside on the west side of Hampstead Heath (no.1), entwining romance and nostalgia, like the wisteria and roses that curl its columns. Once the showstopper of The Hill (now Inverforth House), the private estate of soap tycoon, Lord Leverhulme (1851–1925), it was saved from ruin when it came into public hands in 1960. The shutter-clicks of wedding photographers have long replaced the clink of Edwardian champagne saucers beneath its honeysuckle bowers, but this remains a venue to clear your head – or lose it in reveries.

NW3 7EX
Hampstead
cityoflondon.gov.uk

St John's Lodge Gardens

Meditative beauty in the bosom of Regent's Park

Marco Kesseler

Some places are too special to go in a guide book. This garden may be one of them. Designed in 1888 as a locus of meditation for the (now private) St John’s Lodge, the garden is no place for crowds – perhaps why its entrance features no formal sign. Your only clue is a beguiling pergola festooned with clematis and wisteria leading to a buffer of sombre yew hedges. Beyond, you’ll find a sunken lawn and a series of interlinking circular enclosures, screened by rings of pleached lime trees, perfect for putting the rest of the world from your mind. Now you’re an initiate, don’t tell!

NW1 4NX
Regent's Park
royalparks.org.uk

Inner Temple Gardens

Unbeatable lunchtime getaway

Marco Kesseler

The four Inns of Court each have beautiful and secluded private gardens, but it’s Inner Temple Gardens that clinches the top spot. Its voluminous ‘high border’, a beast of a bed, erupts from spring to autumn with untamed colours and textures. Other full-bodied beds, wistfully Mediterranean, cascade down either side of stone steps to a spacious lawn and medievally-redolent medlars and mulberries, which terminates in a grand avenue of planes at the Embankment. There’s great pedigree too, acknowledged by its red and white roses – just like those plucked right here by the belligerents in the War of the Roses (according to Shakespeare, anyway).

EC4Y 7BS
Blackfriars
innertemple.org.uk

St Dunstan in the East

Pure romance among overgrown ruins

Marco Kesseler

Wartime bombs ripped the ancient church of St Dunstan in the East apart, leaving only a skeleton, and thankfully, its precious Wren-designed steeple, elegantly perched on top of four flying buttresses. The ruins were reinvented as a public garden, and the slow and perfectly judged encroachment of nature is like a Gothic fantasy, creepers tangling their way through tracery windows and vines clothing the walls, dangling evocatively over archways. A tall oak shades a circle of benches in the building’s heart, surrounding a gently burbling fountain turning spirals across stone. It’s a hypnotically beautiful and blissfully romantic spot that enchants all who come.

EC3R 5DD
Monument
cityoflondon.gov.uk

London Wall Place

Multi-layered gardens linking past and future

Marco Kesseler

Not long ago, high-rise concrete shrouded this place in dead-cold shadow. It took incredible ingenuity to resurrect its varied elements across three levels – two long-forgotten gardens, a ruined church tower, and the remnants of the City’s old Roman wall – and make an open and inviting whole. A curving walkway floats above trees, lawns and water that catch the midday sun even in the depths of winter. Workers bask in the warmth amid broad cushions of lavender that cleverly disguise a ramp down to Salters’ Garden and its secluded spots of repose. Sensitivity, creativity, originality – public realm at its best.

EC2Y 5AU
Moorgate
londonwallplace.com