Exhibitors
Show Gardens
London Borough of Barking & Dagenham
Every Generation, Ever Regeneration
Designer: Peter London
Click here to view a panorama of this garden.
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A garden to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II. The garden mixes the old and the new, and takes inspiration from the designer’s Essex-based grandfather who lived next to a park given over to the ‘Dig for Victory’ campaign.
The garden is split into the wartime garden and a contemporary ‘green roof’ garden joined by ‘steps in time’. In the wartime garden the faint sound of a music hall tune can be heard. From the entrance, the eye is drawn down the garden to the dark doorway of an Anderson Shelter from where the music comes from. Walking through a rustic trellis arch, a stone flag leads past the vegetable beds and cold frame to the shelter. 
Various artefacts adorn the garden including ‘Dig for Victory’ posters and sketches of the designer’s grandfather’s actual garden.
Walking back through the garden, the view through the fence reveals the local park planted up with wheat as part of the war effort. The contemporary garden is a green roof representing today’s sustainable-conscious design. The flooring is steel mesh, walls are made of glass and the planting is low maintenance.
The two gardens are joined both physically and metaphorically in two ways. The steps in time ascend from the wartime garden to the contemporary garden with each step representing a decade that has passed since the war. The same apple tree which grows through both gardens, as a sapling in the wartime garden, and a mature tree in the contemporary garden, depicts how consistent features have changed in time.