Cleary Garden: A Hidden Oasis With Roman Roots

One of things I love about exploring the City of London is its abundance of hidden pocket parks and courtyards.

Not only are they calm, little oases of green but they also have fascinating and layered histories.

Discovering Cleary Garden, off Queen Victoria Street, on a peaceful Sunday afternoon put it firmly towards the top of my favourite spots in the City.

From the busy street it looks like a rather pleasant row of benches but dive deeper and you realise that it drops down the hillside and is much bigger than it initially seems…

The Blitz

Prior to the 1940s, the site was occupied by offices and houses.

During the Second World War the City of London was extremely heavily bombed. The map below shows the extent of the damage in the area we are looking at, with the purple indicating ‘damage beyond repair’.

cleary garden bomb damage — _{WW2 bomb damage map from Layers of London}

cleary garden today — _{Map of the area today from Layers of London}

‘Flowering Fred’

A go-getting City worker and keen gardener, Joseph Brandis, decided to turn the space into a public garden, using plants and soil from his own garden in Walthamstow and mud from the river.

The garden was completed in 1949 and became a popular spot for city workers. The Queen Mother even visited; showing how successful the project had been.

The gardens were then significantly re-landscaped in the 1980s to create what we have today and named after Fred Cleary, chairman of the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association. He was known as ‘Flowering Fred’ for his work in creating public gardens in the City.

The Gardens Today

Step into the gardens today and it feels like a real escape from your surroundings.

The gardens are arranged over 3 terraces, created from the basements of the buildings that had previously been there.

Designated a site of Local Importance for Nature Conservation, it is a haven for birds, including robins and blackbirds. Blue tits and sparrows nest in the buddleia here and so it is never short of birds flitting around.

In 2007 a series of grape vines were planted along the upper terraces: a gift from the winemakers of the Loire valley.

_{Who knew there were grapes growing in the centre of the City of London!}

This fittingly harks back to the time when this area was a hub for wine merchants. It is in the ward of Vintry and the Worshipful Company of Vintners headquarters is nearby.

Roman Roots

The area from Cleary Garden down to Upper Thames Street used to be the site of a Roman bath house, built into the hillside.

Constructed in 80AD, it was huge; potentially one of the biggest bath houses in the country and is thought to have been either for public use or part of a palace.

The bath house was fed by spring water, with the area where the gardens now are the location for the tanks and reservoirs that fed the various cold and hot bathing rooms further down the slope.

cleary garden roman bath house — _{Map from Layers of London with additions made}

Above is my rough approximation of where the bath house was located based on the Historic England listing. The gardens are circled in the red and the black outline is the bath house.

It is thought to have been demolished by 300AD, potentially for the building of the Roman defensive wall.

The remains were discovered in 1929 with further excavations taking place in the 1960’s. The only part not underneath the ground, is a retaining wall that can be seen in the gardens.

cleary garden roman wall — _{I believe this is the retaining wall mentioned in the listing for the bath house, but I am not 100%}

You can read more about the bath house and photos of the excavation here.

So, when you are next in the area, it is well worth taking a seat for a moment, admiring the garden and considering the thousands of years of history packed into just one small site.

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