London’s Pocket Parks: Westminster Abbey’s College Garden

If you’ve ever walked past Parliament or seen the outside lawn where politicians are interviewed, you might have noticed a long stone wall and wondered what lies behind it. To find out, I am departing from my usual rule that a pocket park needs to be open to the public to be written about, as this one caught me completely by surprise.

This is College Garden, claimed to be England’s oldest continuously cultivated garden, and despite visiting the Abbey loads of times I had never noticed the covered corridor in the Abbey cloisters that leads to it.

In my defence, I usually don’t walk around the cloisters on my visits, but the other week, I used the member’s entrance to avoid the crowds. While walking “backwards” around the cloisters, I noticed a sign to the gardens. Down a long tunnel that doesn’t look too exciting, past the little cloister, into a large open garden square.

And even accepting that it’s winter, no one else was here either, so maybe my lack of awareness that you can visit it is more forgivable.

Although today mainly laid to lawn, it was originally a kitchen garden, used for growing food for the monastery. It came with beehives and a fishpond, and in 1306, an early herbarium grew herbs for the monks—for culinary as well as medicinal purposes.

The name of the garden, the College, comes from the early meaning of the word—a community of clergy.

Thanks to King Henry VIII, Westminster Abbey isn’t actually an abbey, and officially it’s the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter at Westminster and created a Royal Peculiar under Queen Elizabeth I. However, five hundred years later, we still call it an Abbey.

Today, the lawn dominates the garden, with a long path through the middle and a walking route around the sides. The northern path is part of a longer walking route known as the Way of the Monks.

Thanks to the medieval wall around the garden, it’s kept a little bit warmer for the plants around the edges. These days, gardeners plant lots of wildlife-friendly plants, such as berries for winter birds and hedges for nesting. The tall trees that dominate the centre of the garden are London Planes, which will cast a refreshing shade over the area in the summer months.

At the far corner is a large pond, small fountain, and a historic curiosity – a park bench made for the 600th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt. There is also a work of art, the Crucifixion by Enzo Plazzotta, which was presented to the Abbey in 1993.

Undeniably though, it’s one of those so-called secret spaces that few seemed to know about, and also offers an exceptionally good view of the palace on the other side of the road.

And next time you see a politician being interviewed on the green outside Parliament, you’ll know what’s on the other side of the stone wall.

The garden is open Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and entry is via Westminster Abbey.

Note that they build a large marquee in the garden during the summer months for corporate events, so the space may be somewhat reduced in June and July.