Park of the week

124. Seething Lane Garden

This garden, in the City of London, was renovated in 2018, replacing a classic old, enclosed garden with a modern open style that includes a lawn, trees and a pergola. The cylindrical structure at one end is a lift entrance to an underground car park. I love the name, thinking that perhaps you’d be seething if you couldn’t find it, but it seems to originate from the medieval word ‘sifethen’ meaning ‘full of chaff’, called after a corn market on nearby Fenchurch Street. 

The garden has a long association with the 17th century diarist Samuel Pepys, who lived and worked in the Navy Office which once stood on the site. There, he wrote much of his diary and witnessed the Great Fire of London. The garden includes a bust of Pepys; the music carved on the plinth is the tune of 'Beauty Retire', a song he wrote.

There are also thirty carved stone paving slabs illustrated with symbols linked to his life. One portrays the parmesan cheese and wine Pepys is said to have buried in the garden during the Great Fire. Another shows a plague doctor accompanied by a cheeky rat, another a flea, and yet another shows the surgeon’s forceps used to remove Pepys’ bladder stone (I haven’t included a photo of that one).

The rose beds in the garden commemorate a land dispute in 1381. Sir Robert Knollys’ wife Lady Constance bought the land, a threshing ground at the time, turned it into a rose garden and had a footbridge built over the lane to avoid the mud - it was the bridge for whichthe Authority hadn't granted permission. In the end the City agreed that it could stay, but imposed a symbolic fine of one red rose, to be paid annually on the Feast of St John The Baptist. The occasion is still marked each June in a ceremony overseen by the Company of Watermen and Lightermen of the River Thames in which a red rose is plucked from the garden and delivered to the Lord Mayor of London at Mansion House. 

The garden is close to Fenchurch Street station and is within walking distance of Tower Hill, Bank, Aldgate, and Aldgate East Underground stations, and the DLR link at Tower Gateway.

Judith Field

Seething Lane Garden, Seething Lane, London EC3N 4AT