London’s Pocket Parks: At the sign of the Golden Bottle, EC4

A somewhat shabby sunken garden on the corner of Cheapside and St Pauls in the City of London has been radically redesigned. The tired old hedges have been removed, and space has been opened up with new bedding plants and stone benches, but there’s more to this redesign than seems at first glance.

As a small plot of green on the corner of a busy road junction, it’s always felt a bit of an afterthought, so much so that it doesn’t have an official name — just the nickname of the “sunken garden.” But not any more, as noted at a ceremony on Tuesday to mark the completion of works in the garden — it needs a new nickname.

However, the garden also has a surprising history, which is now reflected in the redesign — as it’s where the UK’s oldest surviving private bank was founded. In 1672, Richard Hoare, a freeman of the Goldmiths’ Company, set up a bank at the Sign of the Golden Bottle — which is how businesses were identified before street numbering. That bank was right here, where this garden is.

The bank moved away after 18 years, but 352 years later, C. Hoare & Co still considers this spot the bank’s foundation. So much so that they contributed to the cost of refurbishing the garden, which now includes a stone plaque about the bank.

Less obvious unless you look and then they jump out at you is that the outline of the original bank is marked in the ground. Look for the small brass markers with the golden bottle sign, and you can stand back and see the building’s footprint.

Yes, the golden bottle looks like a purse — but that’s because bottles used to be made from leather and were, well, purse shaped. It’s just weird a coincidence that the modern day purse, which is associated with money, also looks like a bottle used as a sign by a bank.

The reason there’s a park here and not buildings is thanks to the dilligent efforts of WWII and post-WWII rebuilding which saw the narrow Old Change road replaced with the much wider New Change road, and the 1960s office block that was errected on the bomb damaged land stepped back a bit from the corner, leaving a small space for some trees and the sunken garden.

In recent years, the City of London has been working on a project to improve the environment around Cheapside, which is why there are many more bedding plants around the entrance to St Paul’s tube station.

And now the formerly sunken garden has been unsunk.

And as for the name? It used to be nicknamed the sunken garden, but I suggest it should be called “At the Sign of the Golden Bottle”, as that’s the prominent text on the stone plaque telling the history of the bank that was once here.

The hedge that used to surround the space and looked remarkably sad in the winter months has been removed, as have the old wooden benches. The sunken space has been filled in, and new stone benches have been installed. The replacement planting is a mix of native plants that should be suitable for climate change to a design by Scott Whitby Studio.

One of the other more obvious changes is replacing the old wooden benches with stone slabs. These are interesting, as they come from the Thames Embankment and had been removed as part of the Thames Tideway project before being refurbished by The Stone Carving Company. They’ve deliberately left echoes of the stone’s previous use on the embankment intact, such as where pipes once used to pass through or cuts for old joints.

An interesting point is that they are not concreted in place but sit in a space of compacted ground, as their weight is enough to keep them there. As there’s no need for cement, it avoids the huge amount of CO2 that cement emits when it is made.

The wooden backs on the benches are old London Plane trees that had fallen over in Waltham Forest and were prepared by Fallen & Felled. The brass armrests are by Artisteel. Something coming soon is an enamelled plaque that will tell the story of the pocket park — and AJ Wells, the same firm that makes the signs on the London Underground, will supply it shortly.

The planting is new, so it is quite sparse in places, but it will grow to fill the gaps this year and next, and the pocket park will be surrounded by high plants and the central space a large mound of flowers and foliage.

The old solid paving slabs have been replaced with a permeable aggregate mix so that rainwater can soak into the ground rather than just run off into drains. This reduces pressure on the drains after heavy rain but also increases the amount of water in the ground for the plants, so they are more able to withstand hot summers.

Funding for the project has come from a mix of the City Corporation’s Climate Action Fund, as well as private sector contributions from the Cheapside Business Alliance and C Hoare & Co.

If you’re into unexpected facts, then learn that the park is within an area known as the St Paul’s Depths which exists as a result of Edwardian construction of basements and boreholes that had the effect of lowering the water table in the area. As the cathedral has quite shallow foundations, it was at risk of damage from the subsiding soil — so the St Paul’s Cathedral (Preservation) Act 1935 was passed, requiring all construction around the cathedral to protect the groundwater conditions.

So this refurbished pocket park, with its permeable paving and SUD planting allowing rainwater to soak back into the ground, will, in its own small way, contribute to protecting the huge cathedral on the other side of the road.

Bet you didn’t expect that from a pocket park.