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Brown Hart Gardens, W1, The Way We See It.

“A nice little central London curio for you all this week. Brown Hart Gardens was once a splendid little Mayfair garden for the working classes in Brown Street and Hart Street.

In 1902, green space didn’t seem such a great use of location and an ornate electricity sub station was build upon the site. Now we’ve all seen some pretty ugly substations in our time, luckily this isn’t one of them. Designed by a certain C. Stanley Peach, it’s a baroque (almost) folly in Portland stone.

There are a pavilion and steps at each end, and the idea was that the space above the substation be used as an Italianate style patio. This was closed by London Electricity in 1980 but has since re-opened.

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