Bonnington Square

Bonnington Square stops you in your tracks. Within yards of the Vauxhall gyratory’s noise and diesel fumes, the square opens into a subtropical world of palm trees, bamboo, mimosa, vines climbing every wall, and a nine-metre iron waterwheel half-submerged in lush planting. The community that created it emerged from the London squat scene of the 1970s and 1980s; the central communal area occupies ground that was bombed in the Second World War. Nothing about this place was inevitable.

2008

Bonnington Square, Vauxhall

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

2009

Anchor in Bonnington Square Garden

Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 2.0

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Historical image not found

Today

Bonnington Square

Geograph · CC BY-SA 2.0

Compact rows of London brick houses surround a central double terrace, the whole square built primarily to house railway workers. That Victorian working-class grid is still visible beneath the greenery. The name on the street sign has been here since the 1870s — but where it came from is a more complicated question than it first appears.

The name Bonnington is well attested across England long before Victorian speculative builders began laying out south London streets. As documented by British History Online in the Survey of Kent, the name derives from a manor and parish in Kent — itself recorded in Domesday Book as Bonintone — held by a family who took their name from those lands, styled de Bonnington. The place-name most likely combines an Old English personal name with tūn, meaning a settlement or farm. By the Victorian era, “Bonnington” was a recognised English surname and a known English toponym.

No primary source — no deeds, builder’s records, or council minutes — has been found that identifies the specific individual or reason behind the naming of this Vauxhall square. The name may derive from a developer, investor, or landowner connected to the 1870s building scheme, as was standard practice for Victorian speculative housing. The exact origin of the name as applied to this square remains uncertain.

Bonnington Square was built during the 1870s primarily to house railway workers employed at Nine Elms Goods Yard close by. Charles Booth’s poverty map marked the square as “Mixed, some comfortable, others poor” — a working-class neighbourhood, respectable but never prosperous. The houses were three-storied London brick terraces, many home to more than one family.

Cross-referencing the 1939 Register against the Civilian War Dead record, research has established that two people were killed during the raid of 14 October 1940: widowed Sarah Mary Ann Gough, aged 56, and her son John Edwin Gough, aged 34, who were living at No. 6 Bonnington Square at the time. The seven houses destroyed by bombing created the open ground that would, four decades later, become the Pleasure Garden.

By the late 1970s, the square had been compulsorily purchased by the Greater London Council for the Inner London Education Authority, which intended to demolish it in order to build a new school. A shopkeeper in one of the buildings managed to prevent the demolition through legal means during the period in which all the houses’ occupants were departing, and shortly afterwards squatters began moving into the vacated buildings. It was a sufficient effort at regeneration to persuade the GLC and ILEA in 1983 to lease 25 of the houses to the squatters organised as the Vine Housing Co-operative.

In 1990 the residents undertook a project to change the bombed ground into a “Pleasure Garden” as a nod to the nearby Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, which had closed in 1859, and in so doing formed the Bonnington Square Garden Association. The group included Channel 4 gardener Dan Pearson. Funded by grants and local sponsorship, the garden includes a nine-metre Industrial Revolution iron waterwheel and a large ‘Helping Hand’ sculpture, alongside evocative subtropical planting.

The square has been home to a number of musical figures, with John Lydon, the Jesus and Mary Chain, and the Happy End all reported to have passed through at various points during the squatting era. Originally founded by a disparate crew of travelling hippies and wandering anarchists, many from New Zealand, who brought their DIY communal ethos to London in the early 1980s, the community soon blossomed into a fully-fledged artistic hub. In June 2018, Flute Theatre staged two performances of Twelfth Night, directed by actress Kelly Hunter, in the gardens.

Dan Pearson lived on Bonnington Square during the squatting era and was among the residents who created the Pleasure Garden. He later became one of Britain’s most celebrated garden designers — his work here, transforming a derelict bomb site into a subtropical sanctuary, is part of the story he carried into a national career. Channel 4 gardener Dan Pearson was amongst the residents responsible for the garden.

Andrée Wilson, one of the three founding members of the co-operative, described the enterprise as paradoxically enabled by the Thatcher-era deregulation of the housing market: “None of what we did would have been possible were it not for her.” Thatcher’s reforms made it possible for the community to claim the square as their own. “Because we’d saved the buildings, we felt free to do whatever we wanted with them,” Wilson said.

In 1998, the housing co-operative was permitted by the London Borough of Lambeth to purchase the buildings. The co-operative dissolved in the late 1990s and everyone became a homeowner. Many of the houses are now worth in excess of £1 million, and there is a communal “pleasure garden” with an exotic mix of bamboo, mimosa, and bananas. The square nicknamed “Squatty Bonny” in the 1980s had become one of the most desirable addresses in south London within a generation.

The Bonnington Café — established by the squatters as a volunteer-run vegetarian enterprise — became a local institution. The Bonnington Square Garden Association, formed in 1990 to oversee the garden, began planting street trees, vines, and creating small community gardens in the surrounding area in the early 1990s, which have since flourished significantly. As noted by SE1 Direct, the Vauxhall area around the square has been the subject of sustained regeneration pressure in the years since.

The Bonnington Square of today is a botanical oasis hidden in the midst of Vauxhall, maintaining its maverick spirit. The result of a concerted effort in the 1990s for residents to assert their uniqueness, it makes their little patch of land stand out from the rest. The Pleasure Garden is open to the public, and the square itself — every wall draped in vines, every corner planted — is one of inner London’s most extraordinary streetscapes. The archaeology and layers of the area’s industrial past are acknowledged by MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology), which has recorded evidence of South Lambeth’s pre-Victorian land use in the wider Vauxhall area.

From a marble factory that once stood nearby, a reclaimed waterwheel peeks from beneath the shrubbery in the Pleasure Garden. The square is now entirely residential co-operative and private housing, the café trade having evolved over the decades. What the squatters built from condemned rubble has become — improbably, inevitably — one of London’s great arguments for what community can achieve.