My design London: Garden Museum director Christopher Woodward reveals his guide to the best of the city’s architecture, design, homeware shops and secret spaces

Competitive swimmer and Garden Museum director Christopher Woodward is a Hackney local and and loves the view of London’s double decker buses on Waterloo Bridge and guerrilla gardening in the city’s parks...
Marathon man: Woodward is a competitive swimmer as well as an art historian
Pattie Barron27 May 2017

Director of the Garden Museum at Lambeth and was a trustee of the Heritage Lottery Fund until 2013, Christopher Woodward is also a competitive swimmer.

His most recent marathon swim was 110 miles along the Thames from Oxford to London, to raise funds for the recreation of John Tradescant’s Ark at the Garden Museum.

MY LATEST PROJECT

This week the Garden Museum reopened after 18 months of reconstruction by Dow Jones Architects. The ancient church in which John Tradescant — gardener to King Charles I, traveller and collector — was buried in 1638 has been restored, and a new extension for education and a café built around a new Dan Pearson garden.

My design London: where designers find their inspiration

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WHERE I LIVE

On top of a five-storey block next to Victoria Park in Hackney. It’s a classic Thirties London County Council brick block, but curved with an Art Deco twist. What makes it better than the modern flat-pack-de-luxe is that it is aligned according to the path of the sun. The balcony is in sunshine all day long. For the whole of August, I take my annual holiday in Sicily so everything dies except the Echium pininana, bought at our annual Lots in Pots auction to raise money for a horticultural traineeship.

Six-foot survivor: despite neglect, an echium thrives on Woodward’s balcony
Alamy Stock Photo

MY DREAM LONDON HOME

London Fields Lido. It’s a Thirties open-air lido, 50 metres long. The changing rooms could be converted into a bungalow. And it would be a perfect walled garden for pots. There would be space for me, and my friends could come and swim as long as they follow the rules of aquatic Arcadia: talk only about the right now and the very far away, and not about work or death, school or politics.

Aquatic Arcadia: London Fields Lido would be Woodward’s dream home
Alamy Stock Photo

MOST TREASURED POSSESSION

A clay sculpture of my two sisters and me, when I was seven. We sat on the tiled floor of the artist’s house. It’s what I would rescue from a fire.

Moulded in clay: the one object that Woodward would save from a fire is a sculpture of him and his two sisters (Craig Dick)

MY FAVOURITE LONDON LANDMARK

Double-decker buses crossing Waterloo Bridge on a summer’s night. Lit up, they’re like galleons in sail and the sight makes me feel a Scott Fitzgerald-ish 25 again.

WHERE I ESCAPE

This summer, London Fields Lido is closed for repairs, so I’m a refugee in search of a new paradise. So this year I’m up at Parliament Hill. Hoxton Beach café has just opened up there and they do the most delicious banana cake. If my son, Luca, is here for the weekend, it’s sport, Nando’s and movies.

SECRET SHOP

Choosing Keeping at 128 Columbia Road has notebooks, tape, ink and pencils that are the highest altitude of stationery.

For books, why go to Amazon when the Broadway Bookshop, in Broadway Market, can find a book in 24 hours, and you can whizz by on your bike to collect it?

To make someone happy, I buy an original bouquet of flowers from florist Bold Oxlip at The General Store, Peckham. She has her own cutting garden in Lewisham.

Favourite florist: Bold Oxlip, with its own cutting garden in Lewisham

THE NEXT GARDEN TREND

With James Basson’s Maltese masterpiece for M&G, the Chelsea Flower Show zeitgeist continues to be faraway landscapes reimagined — a movement begun by Dan Pearson’s convention-busting Chatsworth garden in 2015. Botany, not horticulture, is the generational trend: to study plants for what they are, not how we arrange them as gardens. That’s my resolution, to study botany.

WHAT MAKES A GARDEN GREAT?

Commitment to a bold idea, whether it is Louis XIV and Versailles, or Ken Marten and his genius terrariums. Why not turn a sunken garden into a lake, asked the late French landscape designer Pascal Cribier, which he did at Woolton House in Berkshire, the best new garden I saw last year. Why not just have a garden with black flowers, like the painter Maggi Hambling has made? Every great garden begins with a “why not?”

BEST LONDON OUTDOOR SPACE

London Fields, which I cycle through each evening on the way home. It’s just a triangle of scuffed grass, lined with trees, but the life comes from the places it connects, and the grace of plane trees growing unchecked. And Hackney council — which loves its parks — makes a meadow each year. One night the guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds came to a barbecue picnic I organised there, and he planted passion flowers around the lamp posts. Of course the maintenance department removed them.

TOP LONDON DESTINATION

The Stories On Our Plate supper club in Clapton. My old housemate Jolien Benjamin, a food anthropologist and educator, had the brilliant idea of inviting migrant and refugee chefs from Syria and Siberia to cook meals from home and tell the stories behind them.

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