This long rectangular garden doesn’t look that interesting at first glance, until you start to research it.
It looks like a classic Victorian garden square surrounded by Victorian houses, and indeed, originally that’s what it was. Union Square was built on part of the Clothworkers’ Estate in the 1840s and was a private garden for the houses that surrounded it.
By the early 1900s, there was a call for the local borough to buy the garden and open it up for the public, but nothing happened until 1946, when the estate owners, the London and Manchester Assurance Company, passed the freehold to Islington Borough Council.
The gardens were opened to the public shortly afterwards.
The next major change was around the garden, when the entire western side was flattened to build the Packington Estate in the late 1960s. This was a time when much of what are now multi-million-pound houses were pretty shabby, slum-grade houses, and at the time, no one thought them worth saving.
The rebuilding decision swept away all the Victorian houses on the western side, and the garden itself gained a large pond in the middle.
Those 1960s blocks lasted even less time than the Victorian houses they replaced, and were in turn demolished in 2007, and the council estate redeveloped. As part of that project, they reinstated a modern version of the original row of Victorian houses facing onto Union Square.
OS map 1877
OS map 1968
OS map 1972
You can see the difference more sharply from above, as the modern row of houses has a long flat roof, whereas the originals on the eastern side have the usual pointed roofs.
So that’s how Union Square gained, lost and regained its Victorian garden square appearance.
Even the King approved.
The pocket park at the heart of all this upheaval doesn’t seem to have been given as much attention in recent years though. It has the air of a slightly run-down park, with a long lawn in the middle in need of some tender loving care.
The dense tree cover probably does excuse some of the lawns appearance, but it’s fixable.
A nice touch is the angled benches along the side, and a curious paved section in the middle seems likely to be a legacy of the pond that used to be there.
A stone font-like planter in the garden celebrates when the London and Manchester Assurance Company donated the garden freehold to the local council.
Unlike another garden square just a few minutes away, which was busy with people enjoying the late summer sun, this park was deserted.
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