The_roof_gardens_and_babylon

Part of the Kensington Roof Gardens

Kensington Roof Gardens (formerly known as Derry and Toms Roof Gardens) is a roof garden covering 6,000 m² (1.5 acres) on top of the former Derry and Toms building on Kensington High Street, in central London, near Kensington Gardens. The gardens – the largest roof garden in Europe – are accessible from Derry Street, through a doorway marked "99 Kensington High Street". The gardens are open to the public unless pre-booked by a private party. The gardens adjoin a restaurant/night-club, and are situated 30 metres above street level (on the 6th floor of the building) with a panoramic view over west London.

The gardens were laid out between 1936 and 1938 by Ralph Hancock, a landscape architect, on the instructions of Trevor Bowen (then vice-president of Barkers, the Kensington department store giant that owned the site and constructed the building in 1932). The building housed the department store Derry and Toms until 1973, and then Biba until 1975.

It is divided into three themed gardens:

The Kensington Roof Gardens are barely visible from Kensington High Street.

• a formal Spanish garden, in a Moorish style, with fountains, vine-covered walkways and Chusan palms;
• a Tudor style garden, with wisteria and roses;
• an English woodland garden, with over 100 species of trees, a stream, and a garden pond that is the home to ducks and flamingos. Despite being on a rooftop, the trees were made the subject of tree preservation orders in 1976.

The gardens are not widely known because they are not a tourist attraction, but are run as part of the restaurant and nightclub. The Roof Gardens have been owned by Sir Richard Branson since 1981, and, with Necker Island and two properties in Africa, they form part of the Virgin "Limited Edition".

The nearest tube station is High Street Kensington.

The Roof Gardens in fiction

The Derry and Toms Roof Gardens are a significant and recurrent location in the Jerry Cornelius stories written by Michael Moorcock. They are the setting for the opening scenes of the second Cornelius novel, A Cure for Cancer (1971), where Jerry encounters a Westland Whirlwind helicopter firing on a party of tea-drinking old ladies in a satire on the (then contemporary) Vietnam war. The gardens also feature as the setting for a musical and dance extravaganza in Lorna Hill\'s "No castanets at the Wells". It is also the opening location in Moorcock\'s comic novel The Chinese Agent, featuring Jerry Cornell.

Image gallery

External links

• Google Maps aerial picture of the gardens (added 9 May 2006)
• Kensington Roof Gardens photos (checked 9 May 2006)
• Website with pictures of this and other roof gardens in London (added 8 May 2006)
• The Roof Garden\'s website (checked 18 February 2008)
• Ralph Hancock website
• Virgin Limited Edition website (checked 9 May 2006)
• Kensington Roof Gardens Reviews
• Ralph Hancock Blog

Coordinates: 51°30′4″N 0°11′31″W / 51.50111, -0.19194

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from Wikipedia