Dates announced for the 13th Open Gardens Squares Weekend

Sent to me as a press release, but acceptable as a) it is written sensibly and b) it’s something I would have written about anyway.

Anyway – the Annual Open Garden Squares Weekend has announced its initial itinerary for the event which will this year take place on the weekend of June 11th-12th, so those are the dates to block off in your diary. Basically a variant of the more widely known London Open House Weekend Open City Weekend, it is a chance to wander around some 200 normally private gardens dotted around the city.

Unlike its architectural cousin, there is a charge for the event – £7.50 in advance or £10 on the weekend – but it does cover the whole weekend and is pretty good value for money if you make use of both days as I did last year.

Most of the gardens will be ones you can wander into on the day – although as I realised last year, careful planning is needed to take into account some being open only at certain times of the day.

Advance booking – starting in May – will be essential for visits to the private gardens inside HMP Wormwood Scrubs and Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace. For the first time, there will be a garden on top of a supermarket; a garden with a building with a fizzy bottle roof and the garden used for horticultural therapy at Royal Hospital Chelsea. There will be the opportunity to tour the newly-restored gardens of Chiswick House with a local historian and discover its links to nearby Sutton Court.

Also, as last year, somewhat closer to the date I will convert their rather unwieldy list into a map format, which I personally find much easier to use when plotting my route around town.