Mark Street Gardens

Mark Street Gardens occupies a space that has undergone several dramatic transformations over the last two centuries. For many years, the land was dominated by the Langbourne Buildings, a massive block of high-density working-class tenements. These apartments were commissioned by the Victorian philanthropist and future Lord Mayor of London, Sidney Waterlow, as part of a mission to provide decent housing for the city's poorest residents. After the buildings were demolished in the late nineteen seventies, the area was reclaimed as a public green space in the early nineteen eighties. Today, if you walk along the central path of the park, you are following the exact route of the original Mark Street, which vanished from the map when the housing blocks were cleared away.