Eccleston Square

Eccleston Square owes its very existence to a massive act of land transformation. Before the mid-nineteenth century, this entire area was a low-lying swamp that functioned as market gardens for London. The land was so prone to flooding that it was long considered a poor candidate for construction, until the master builder Thomas Cubitt took on the daunting task of draining and developing the marshy plain in the eighteen-thirties. Cubitt shaped the square into a hallmark of London planning, naming it after the village of Eccleston in Cheshire, which held the country seat of his patrons, the land-owning Grosvenor family. He did not simply build houses; he crafted an integrated environment where the private, central gardens provided a lush, controlled escape from the city. The garden has since evolved into a horticultural site of surprising diversity, holding a rare National Collection of ceanothus and even a Wollemi pine, a species that was thought to be extinct until its rediscovery in Australia in the mid-nineties.