London Out of Sight: Exploring the City's Secret Green Spaces

LONDON OUT OF SIGHT: EXPLORING THE CITY'S SECRET GREEN SPACES is an essential handbook for the resident or visitor seeking solace from the bustling and hectic city. With a focus on green and outdoor spaces, the book explores the capital's charming hidden squares, graveyards, lush community and public gardens and parks, sprawling woods, working city farms, and idiosyncratic and hidden points of interest. London doesn't immediately spring to mind as a city teeming with quiet and beautiful green areas, but the bustling sprawl belies a wealth of fascinating and meditative spaces. LONDON OUT OF SIGHT highlights a number of these, with profiles comprising practical information, historical and cultural contexts and beautiful original photography. LONDON OUT OF SIGHT is organised by area and the book features such diverse inclusions as: - Richmond Park in west London, notable for its wildlife and facets such as King Henry's Mound, its ancient walls and Ian Dury's bench, Hampstead Heath and Belair Park in Dulwich replete with lake the last above-ground lengths of the River Effra; -Hackney, Spitalfields, Mudchute and Freightline's City Farms; -Gunnersbury Nature Triangle, the London Wetlands Centre in Barnes and the Camley Street Nature Reserve in King's Cross; -The public and historic gardens at Chiswick House, famed for the birth of the English Landscape movement, and with an observatory, Ionic temples, waterfalls, Doric and the Inigo Jones gateway, the Hill Garden and Pergola in Hampstead, the Horniman Museum Gardens in Forest Hill and the Geffrye Museum Gardens in Shoreditch; -The community Phoenix Garden in Charing Cross, St Mary's Secret Garden in Hackney and the Calthorpe Project in King's Cross; -Elephant and Castle Urban Forest, and the vast swathes of Sydenham Hill Woods and Cox's Walk; -The 'Magnificent Seven' city cemeteries (Abney Park, Highgate, West Norwood, Nunhead, Brompton, Kensal Green and Tower Hamlets) and the Churchyard at St Pancras and St Giles; -Quiet city escapes such as St Dunstan-in-the-East and the accessible legal Fields; -Fascinating sculpture, follies, abandoned tunnels and other idiosyncrasies such as the crumbling abbey and Paxton Tunnel in Sydenham Woods, the Ruined Arch in Kew, and the Crystal Palace dinosaurs. LONDON OUT OF SIGHT is an aesthetically wonderful, informative and indispensible guide to anyone seeking out London's quiet, green and hidden nooks and corners. ILLUSTRATIONS: 170 colour Rb/w