Comments on: The Horticultural History Of The East End https://spitalfieldslife.com/2024/04/25/the-horticultural-history-of-the-east-end/ In the midst of life I woke to find myself living in an old house beside Brick Lane in the East End of London Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:00:39 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 By: Lynne Perrella https://spitalfieldslife.com/2024/04/25/the-horticultural-history-of-the-east-end/#comment-1568689 Thu, 25 Apr 2024 11:00:39 +0000 https://spitalfieldslife.com/?p=199496#comment-1568689 Ah — the chickweed seller! Just look into those eyes. The engraver has seemingly concocted a man totally made of soft mossy flora and tightly-textured ground cover. As he strides, I trust he gives off an aroma of crushed herbs underfoot, and I imagine little bits of greenery trailing from his coat tails. A magical garden god.

May I say that I am a modest container-on-the-deck “gardener”, still waiting for the right moment to place my plantings? Here in the Hudson River Valley, our temps were in the high 20s
last night. Brrrrrrrrr! I typically wait until mid-May to even attempt to put out the tender young flowers, but the glory of those colorful blooms are always worth the wait.

]]> By: Mark Gorman https://spitalfieldslife.com/2024/04/25/the-horticultural-history-of-the-east-end/#comment-1568672 Thu, 25 Apr 2024 09:32:26 +0000 https://spitalfieldslife.com/?p=199496#comment-1568672 Fascinating article, and the story of east Londoners’ love of gardens continued despite the Victorian building boom. As housing spread they moved to “garden grounds” across the river Lea, east of Stratford, where land became available as large estates were sold from the 1860s. In the area east of Stratford along the line of the Great Eastern Railway “Londoners, such as Curtain Road cabinet makers and inhabitants of Whitechapel, often bought plots for gardens. They used to put up huts and spend the weekend in them, and many built homes at a later time”.

A number of the summer-houses erected in the gardens were later converted into permanent dwellings as London grew eastwards. By the early 1870s the Birkbeck Freehold Land Society was offering plots of land in the Stratford area ‘either for building or gardening purposes’, for 5/- a month.

And into the 20th century the movement continued out into Essex with the development of the Plotlands near Basildon in the interwar years. In fact east Londoners’ search for small plots of land only really ended on the Essex coast, where Jaywick began life in the 1920s as affordable holiday homes with gardens.

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