Three free gardens sit within about half a mile of Vauxhall station, and all three were made by the people who live around them. Bonnington Square Garden was built by residents on a Blitz site from 1990; Harleyford Road Community Garden was laid out by a housing co-op in the 1980s; and Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is a public park on the ground of the eighteenth-century pleasure garden, with a city farm's paddocks inside it.
Our guide to Vauxhall and Oval covers the streets, the station, the cricket and the clubs under the arches, and gives the outline of the Pleasure Gardens. This page is about the gardens themselves: who dug them, what is in them, when the gates are open and how to walk between the three.
None charges anything, none is signposted from the station, and two are maintained entirely by volunteers with no council money. That last fact explains most of what you see.
The three gardens at a glance
- Bonnington Square Garden
- Bonnington Square, off Vauxhall Grove, SW8 1GA. Free. Open morning to evening, locked at night
- Harleyford Road Community Garden
- Harleyford Road, SE11, behind a perimeter wall with a small ironwork gate. Free. Volunteer workdays on the first Sunday of the month
- Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens
- Tyers Street, SE11 5HL. Free, open 24 hours. Lambeth Council
- Vauxhall City Farm
- 165 Tyers Street, SE11 5HS. Free entry, suggested £4 donation. Tuesday to Sunday 10.30am to 4pm, last entry 3.45pm (read September 2026)
- Nearest station
- Vauxhall (Victoria line, South Western Railway, zones 1 and 2). Oval (Northern line) for Bonnington Square
- Walking the three
- About half a mile end to end; allow an hour and a half with stops
Bonnington Square: six bombed houses and a builder's storage application
The square was built in the 1870s for railway workers, and the middle of it is where six houses stood until the Blitz. They were never rebuilt. Lambeth laid the gap out as a playground with swings and benches in the 1970s, then stopped maintaining it, and by the late 1980s it was waste ground.
What saved it was a planning application. In 1990 a builder asked the council for permission to use the site for storage, and the residents formed the Bonnington Square Garden Association in response. The Association took a long lease on 2 to 12 Bonnington Square from Lambeth in 1993–94, money was raised by August 1994, and the garden was built. In 1998 the council enabled the residents to form a co-operative and buy the houses, which is why the square still looks like a place people live in.
They called it the Pleasure Garden, in homage to the original Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens about a hundred metres north of the site. That is still the garden's other name.
Photo: Mcarse · CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons · resized
What is in the Pleasure Garden, and who planted it
The design was done by committee, and the committee was unusual. The Association was led by Evan English, an Australian; the original planting plan came from two residents, the New Zealander James Fraser and the garden designer Dan Pearson, whose brief to themselves was a mix of the classic English and the exotic tropical, of gentle textures and the bold architectural. Andrew Gleave-Coley has added to the planting since.
Five things to find in a garden the size of two house plots:
- The wheel. An eight-metre marble-factory slurry wheel from the 1860s, rescued from a works nearby and installed by two resident engineers. It stands at one end of the garden and it is the reason people photograph the place.
- The boat, mounted above a pergola smothered in wisteria.
- The walnut, about sixty feet, planted in the early 1980s, before the garden existed.
- The lime arbour and the birch grove, which are what make a small square feel enclosed.
- Bamboo, a banana and New Zealand plants in the raised beds. In August it reads as subtropical; in February, as a very green London square.
The garden is owned by Lambeth and managed by the Association, which anyone may join. It gets no ongoing funding beyond green-waste collection and is maintained by residents on quarterly workdays. There are no listed structures in it, it is not on Historic England's register of parks and gardens, and the London Squares Preservation Act 1931 does not cover it. Its protection is the co-operative that owns the houses round it.
The garden is open morning to evening and locked at night, with no published clock. London Parks & Gardens records it that way, and in practice the gate follows the light and the volunteers: earlier in winter, later in summer. There is no telephone number on the gate. If it is locked, the street planting round the square is the consolation and it is worth the detour on its own.
The Paradise Project: why the street is greener than the square
Once the garden was finished the Association kept going, under the name the Paradise Project, planting trees, vines and small street gardens in every gap in the surrounding streets. Much of the tree planting in Langley Lane and Vauxhall Grove came from it, continuing the unofficial planting the square's squatter residents had begun in the 1980s. Money from the Vauxhall Cross development paid for rosemary and lavender around some of the street trees.
The effect is that the approach roads are the attraction as much as the garden is. Walk in from Vauxhall Grove rather than cutting straight across, and look at the house fronts: the vines are on the buildings, not in the beds. This is the kind of place our round-up of London's secret gardens is built from.
At 11 Vauxhall Grove, in the corner of the square, the Bonnington Centre Community Association runs the old school building, with a long-standing vegetarian café inside it cooked by a different volunteer each evening. It holds a food hygiene rating of 4 from an inspection in June 2026. It is not a restaurant in any normal sense: check the Centre's own pages for which evenings are running before you rely on it, and see our notes on buying food to eat outdoors in London for the alternative.
Harleyford Road Community Garden, the one you walk past
Five minutes west, on the north side of Harleyford Road, a brick perimeter wall with a small ironwork gate hides the second garden. The site was the long front gardens of a Georgian terrace, mostly demolished by the 1970s, with the land ending up with the GLC and then Lambeth's housing department.
In 1984 the Vauxhall Housing Co-op formed a garden here and set up the Harleyford Road Garden Association to run a feasibility study. Vegetables came first; the garden as it stands was designed and laid out by local residents between 1986 and 1988, and they still run it, with workdays on the first Sunday of every month.
Inside there is a children's play area, grass, a picnic area, shrubberies of native and exotic plants, herb beds and a small pond. A few mature sycamores survive from the original domestic gardens; everything else was planted from scratch. A mosaic wall, extended mosaic paths and new benches were added in 2009. Schools and nursery groups use it for nature study, so on a weekday morning in term time you may find it busy with children.
The Georgian terrace that the garden grew out of is still there, and most of it is listed Grade II: the survivors at 15 to 63 Harleyford Road were listed in March 1981, together with forecourt piers and railings. It is the clearest surviving evidence of what this road looked like before the gyratory.
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens: eight hundred years is the wrong number
The park on Tyers Street is the descendant of the most famous pleasure garden in Europe, and the dates are worth getting right. Lambeth records the original as first laid out in 1661 as a privately managed entertainment venue, reaching its greatest popularity in the early nineteenth century, and closing in 1859 when tastes changed. Handel, Casanova, Pepys and Rossini are all recorded as visiting or writing about it. That is a run of just under two centuries, not eight hundred years.
The site was then built over with housing. After the Second World War the housing was cleared and the ground laid out as a public open space called Spring Gardens, with paths, grass mounds and trees. The renaming came with a recent programme of investment that also brought a floodlit games area, new trees and meadow grassland full of spring bulbs.
The signal that tells you what the ground used to be is at the Kennington Lane entrance: two monumental columns framing the view into and out of the park, each topped by an outline figure in seventeenth-century dress. Walk in that way rather than from Tyers Street, and the park makes sense.
The park and the farm together are a designated Site of Importance for Nature Conservation for Lambeth. The park is open 24 hours and has no gates to be locked out of.
Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is not on Historic England's register of parks and gardens. We checked the register's own open data in September 2026 and there is no entry for it. That matters if you were expecting an interpreted historic landscape: what survives above ground is the outline of the site and two modern columns, not the walks, supper boxes and orchestra of the eighteenth century. Come for the park, not for the archaeology.
The city farm inside the park
Vauxhall City Farm occupies about an acre and a half at 165 Tyers Street, with its horse and livestock paddocks spilling out into the eastern side of the Pleasure Gardens. Entry is free with a suggested £4 donation, and the farm's own pages gave its opening as Tuesday to Sunday, 10.30am to 4pm, with last entry at 3.45pm, when we read them in September 2026. It has a riding school and a café on site, and it counts over 60,000 visitors a year.
Our guide to city farms and playgrounds in London compares it with six others, explains the hygiene rules that matter with animals and warns that the farm treats its own opening days as typical rather than fixed. Check before travelling with children, and do not plan a Monday.
Walking the three in one go
Start at Oval on the Northern line and walk down to Bonnington Square, about ten minutes through the terraces; or start at Vauxhall on the Victoria line and reach the square in a similar time by going east under the railway. Do the square first, because it is the one most likely to be locked and you want time to change plan.
From the square, Harleyford Road is five minutes west, and the Pleasure Gardens and the farm five to ten minutes on from there. Finish at the park, because it never closes and because the farm's last entry is the only fixed deadline in the day. The Albert Embankment is a couple of minutes north, and our guide to the Thames Path sets out the stretch east towards Lambeth Bridge. Everything here belongs on our list of free things to do in London.
If community gardens are the reason you came, the two others worth the journey are the Culpeper Community Garden in Islington, which has staff and published hours, and the Phoenix Garden in St Giles, which opens dawn to dusk every day. Bonnington Square has taken part in the June open-gardens weekend nineteen times, most recently in 2018; our guide to London Open Gardens explains how that weekend works now.
Frequently asked questions
Can anyone go into Bonnington Square Garden?
Yes. It is a public garden owned by Lambeth Council and managed by the Bonnington Square Garden Association, free to enter, open from morning to evening and locked at night. There is no ticket and no booking, and the Association is open for anyone to join.
What is the big wheel in Bonnington Square?
An eight-metre slurry wheel from a marble factory, dating from the 1860s, rescued from works near the square and installed in the garden by two residents who were engineers. It is the garden's best-known feature and it sits at one end of the planting.
Is anything left of the original Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens?
Only the ground itself. The gardens ran from 1661 to 1859, the site was then covered in housing, and the housing was cleared after the Second World War. Today's park occupies part of the same land, and the two columns with figures in period dress at the Kennington Lane entrance are a modern reference to it rather than a survival.
Is Vauxhall City Farm open on Mondays?
No. The farm's own pages gave its opening as Tuesday to Sunday, 10.30am to 4pm, with last entry at 3.45pm, when we checked in September 2026, and the farm describes its days as typical rather than guaranteed. Entry is free with a suggested £4 donation. Check before travelling.
How long does it take to see all three gardens?
About an hour and a half including the walking. The route is roughly half a mile, flat and paved. The two community gardens take fifteen minutes each; the park and the farm together take rather longer.
Sources
- London Parks & Gardens – inventory site record LAM006, Bonnington Square (opening times, ownership, designers, designations) (checked September 2026)
- Bonnington Centre Community Association – the Bonnington Square and Harleyford Road community gardens (checked September 2026)
- Lambeth Council – Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens: history, 1661 to 1859, the Kennington Lane columns and the SINC designation (checked September 2026)
- Vauxhall City Farm – address, opening days, suggested donation and site size (checked September 2026)
- Historic England – National Heritage List for England open data (Harleyford Road listed terraces; no registered park entry at Vauxhall) (checked September 2026)
- Food Standards Agency – food hygiene rating register (Bonnington Cafe, 11 Vauxhall Grove SW8 1TD, rated 4 on 12 June 2026) (checked September 2026)