Welcome to the Earl’s Court Square Garden Website

Garden AGM - 21 January 2019 - For details go to News

Our Garden

This award-winning Victorian garden was originally laid out as part of the Edwardes Estate in the 1870s, and was well managed with an almost full-time gardener until 1939.  However in the Second World War the handsome cast iron railings were taken away and five huge emergency water tanks filled the southern half of the garden.  From the end of the War until the early 1970s it fell into disrepair, an overgrown area used as a dump and surrounded by green wire netting.  In the mid 1970s the newly-formed Residents’ Association brought the garden under the 1851 Kensington Improvement Act.  Landscape gardener and resident Christopher Fair designed the present layout.  The established London plane trees were left and have now grown to dominate the Square; one on the south side was blown down in the 1987 gale.  The garden has been maintained and improved in the past several decades culminating in a first prize in the Brighter Kensington & Chelsea Scheme competition.  A children’s play area was added in 1980.  In recent times the garden has been host to many neighbourhood social events, including a very popular annual summer BBQ, a Christmas tree lighting party, and several soirées musicales during the spring and summer months.

The rather grand stuccoed terraces in the late Italianate-style on three sides of the Square are complemented by the Grade II* listed Flemish-style red brick houses on the south side.  In the early 1970s part of the Square was in danger of being torn down and replaced with high density housing.  However this disaster was averted when the Square was designated a Conservation Area.  The last twenty years have seen the conversion of the remaining hotels in the Square into high quality flats.

Watch a report on Deutsche Welle television from June 2017 on our garden by clicking here