FT.com print article Annotated

via www.gardenrant.com

“London’s streets are in a very sad state,” sighs Terry Brown, of the intriguingly named Bring Fronts Back campaign.

“Many people seem to have abandoned any interest in their front gardens whatsoever, so long as they can get a four-by-four up the drive.”

“One-third of the total green space in London is private gardens,” says Carlo Laurenzi, chief executive of the London Wildlife Trust. “Yet they are disappearing fast. London has lost 30 per cent of its front gardens in recent years”. That is an area 22 times the size of the city’s sprawling Hyde Park.

Yet there are powerful incentives to pave. Research by the property search engine Zoomf found that Londoners will pay on average 7.5 per cent more for a home with a parking space; in central London, says the estate agency Savills, a car space can add as much as £250,000 to the value of a property.

Paving proves a fragile thing financially. The evidence, according to Laurenzi, is that “where only one or two houses in a street have paved over front gardens, the individual prices of those houses will go up. But when every house in the street does it, it reduces the value of everyone’s house.”

The once lively space of the British front garden has shown a dramatic decline. The anterior plot, as we know it today, came into being in the mid-19th century, explains Tim Richardson, a garden critic and trustee of the Garden History Society. Its first incarnation was the “gardenesque” style trumpeted by the indefatigable Victorian horticulturist John Claudius Loudon. A thrillingly exotic plant such as a yukka typically took centre stage, surrounded by gravel and “possibly a little edging bed”.

The 1930s saw the ascent of rockeries – miniature “quotations”, as front gardens usually are, explains Richardson, of what was to be found in the back. Then followed by the postwar cottage garden and, in the 1960s, finally, the advent of the garden as an “outdoor room”.

A tour of the front-yard-scape in my south London neighbourhood reveals a much less fecund scene. Cracked, stained tarmac rules – scattered with the detritus of last Saturday night, garlanded with the odd tatty hedge and serving only as firm support for a dull regiment of wheelie bins.

The front yard is an ambiguous space, a no man’s land between the public domain of the street and the private one of the house, and that uncertain status might partly explain its neglect. Behind it you will often find magnificent interiors and equally marvellous back gardens: a symptom, perhaps, of the general retreat from commonly owned things, such as streets, that characterises modern Britain and other western societies.

But the transitional status of the front garden also makes it ripe with opportunity. As cuisine is to the French, gardening, says Richardson, “is the vernacular British art form”. For Brown, who is a partner with GMW architects, the front yard “should be part of how we express ourselves and change our mood as we move from a public zone to a private one”.

More daring inspiration is to be found overseas. Susan Harris, a garden coach and blogger, tells me of the lush woodland and meadow gardens proliferating in her suburb near Washington DC – ostentatious challenges to the normally sedate British front.

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Is it possible that British garden inspiration has come full circle?

Will we echo the Brits and say, bring Gifford Garden back? Why don’t we not remove it in the first place?–Duncan