There is in the City of London a strange dead-end – an elevated walkway that ends with you peering precariously over a steep drop. A pedway to nowhere.
This is an elevated pocket park next to London Wall that’s both open to visit, but sufficiently off the obvious routes so hardly known.
Long maligned as bad planning done worse, the pedways are making a triumphant return to the City of London. Away with windswept concrete plazas that sat leaden upon the land and hello to filaments of steel dancing around buildings.
The ruined church was a victim of post-war planning, to build wide roads and move pedestrians away from the streets, but in doing do, the new roads and highwalks isolated the ruined church from public access.
A less appealing garden is difficult to imagine, and if there wasn’t a sign announcing that this patch of paving was actually a garden, I’d have never expected it to be one.
This is one of London’s former graveyards turned into public park, but with the rare advantage that the church it’s attached to still existing.
Dotted around London can be found various remnants of the original Roman Wall that once encircled it, yet one fragment is rarely seen, despite being in full view of those who know where to find it.
Of the many post-war mistakes built in the City of London, one of the ugliest has managed to cling on determinedly, the black and steel monolith of St Alphage House.
Hidden away from sight in a side room next to an underground car park is one of the more important remains of the old London Wall that actually dates from before the wall was built. When the Romans first started…
