A visitor takes a photo of the flowers of the ‘Superbloom’ garden in the moat of the Tower of London, in London (Dominic Lipinski/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)There is a street in Finchley that I visit often. It has 18 houses, and enough room for each household to park a car on the street. But each house has gutted its front garden, torn up its trees and dropped its kerbs. Now almost no one can park on the street because, if they do, they will block their parking spaces, and this seems to me the very definition of insanity. Plants, if they still exist, wobble in corners, choking.
Lack of foresight has made London near uninhabitable during heatwaves, and prone to flooding in rainstorms — in future, we will have more of both. We need gardens to lower the temperature, to absorb excess water, to support biodiversity, and for our sanity: we are supposed to live under trees and near water, not under tower blocks near tarmac.
