East meets west.
To find Crossrail Gardens, you need to look up. Located on top of a railway station and having opened only in 2015, The Crossrail Garden in Canary Wharf is a new green space in London. It’s surrounding area feels full of adults in suits carrying briefcases and deep in conversation. The indoor walkways around the gardens feel like you’re at an airport terminal, with small grab and go restaurants and designer watch shops lining long networks of indoor corridors around Canary Wharf.
There were lots of office workers on their lunch breaks when I visited, a bustle of trying to buy their lunch as time efficiently as possible. Maybe they were in the mindset to grab their lunch and head to the Crossrail Gardens. When I found the lift that took you up to the gardens, it was for the most part empty. For those looking to reset their brains on a lunch break the gardens are a good place to try and do that. Going beyond the practicality of the garden being a reset space (and I don’t say that lightly, green spaces are so important for mental health), Crossrail has a rather impressive concept behind its layout.
Sitting on the prime meridian (a longitude reading of 0 running from pole to pole), the gardens divide the eastern and western hempisphere. Thinking of this prime meridian in terms of what you would find, if you were to travel around the world east to west, you would experience different climates and therefore different plant species. The gardens at Crossrail try to recreate this. In the east end of the garden you see bamboos, magnolias and Japanese maples and in the west the New Zealand fern, strawberry trees and gum Trees. It’s a concept that could easily be missed and is therefore a bit of an oversight. Nonetheless it’s a detail that once you know of it, you can really appreciate the effort that went into the planting. It allows the lunch break visitors a chance to travel around the botanicals of the world in the space of 30 minutes before heading back to the office.
To go from being sat at a desk in an office environment to then be transported around the world east to west in the form of a garden is a pretty ingenious and inspiring idea. If you can’t travel the world right now, the garden brings the world to you. Having Korean for lunch? Sit in the east end of the garden around bamboo plants and suddenly you’re not in Canary Wharf, you could fool your senses into thinking your in Asia. Maybe. Either way it’s a fun concept and one to take a look at in London.
