But now a new project is taking shape, this one blessed with a 999-year lease.
Called The Story Garden, it succeeds the much larger one behind The British Library.
The original has to depart after a tenure of three years, which actually lasted six.
The new Story Garden is on The Triangle Site, a ten-minute walk up York Way.
Above the main railway, its awkward shape explains why it could be spared by developers.
Let’s start on the last day the old Story Garden was open, September 25.
The community gardening group was choosing plants to save, so leader Carley Woolton handed me over to Jillian Linton.
Both of them work for Global Generation, an educational charity passing on a wide range of practical skills to local people (so wide that I first met them acting in a London Sinfonietta production about women gardeners, Ladies in Bloomers, on September 14).
It was a golden afternoon after many such, so a container garden on concrete at the end of its term was looking very dry.
Rainwater saving was the main source of irrigation, but this was a summer of drought.
Saying that the focus was “hyper local”, Jillian mentioned the activities that have been established, from Bangladeshi women living over the road who grew vegetables in raised beds to such crafts as weaving or pottery, to story-telling, dance, meditation.
Walking between raised planters, “hugel” mounds, handmade wooden buildings, a yurt, polytunnels, a story circle of fruit trees in containers, it was striking quite how many varieties of plants were there, some planted, some wild.
I noted down scores of them, from mint to brambles, rose to hawkbit, aubergine to valerian.
At the entrance a board announced, Story Garden, Growing Food, People and Community! – a mission statement it seemed has been well accomplished.
A few weeks later (October 22), there I was, hoping to discover a nameless turning off York Way about which maps are discreet.
Past padlocked gates, electrical substations with Danger of Death! notices, there at last was a big Triangle Site sign and a welcoming open gate.
It was one of the Story Garden’s regular volunteer Twilight Build evenings, and people were already busy, learning to weave willow hurdles, to test mixes for an earth floor (how much local clay to sand, straw, grit, etc.), sorting other clays for wall-covering, sawing timber.
The site was more advanced than I’d expected, with self-build structures for offices, kitchen, classrooms in the making, all using sustainable techniques such as a chestnut shingle roof, wood frames, clay walls, homemade bricks.
It seemed that the site was more given over to buildings than gardening, but community build manager Alice Hardy, engagingly enthusiastic and knowledgeable, said that the far point of the triangle had already had 2.5m of contaminated soil removed and replaced by fresh soil.
They will start planting trees to form a woodland this winter, there is already a polytunnel, and will be green roofs.
Also, doubtless the wild flowers that so resiliently arrived in the first garden will soon find a footing here, once the work is done.
It’s an inspiring project, welcoming volunteers … globalgeneration.org.uk.
