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Regular folk rarely get the chance to get up close and personal with the way the royals live. But that could slowly start to change, as there’s a campaign to turn a strip of the lawn at Buckingham Palace into a public garden.
The proposal was first made in 2015 to mark the Queen’s ninetieth birthday, but is now being suggested again as a memorial garden for Her Maj. The plans would involve knocking an arch through the palace wall at Grosvenor Place and building a new wall around the rest of the gardens.
The campaign is being led by the Buckingham Palace Park Project, which is independent of the royal family. Campaigner Stefan Simanowitz said: ‘We had hoped this part of the palace gardens would be bequeathed to the nation by the Queen herself, but now – to mark her passing – the proposal is to create a new Royal Park as a living legacy to our longest-serving Monarch.
‘As this period of official national mourning comes to an end, our thoughts turn to how we will mark Her Majesty’s memory, we are hopeful that this project might act as both a fitting tribute to the Queen as well as a welcome new green space in a congested corner of London.’
Antonia Pisano, the architect designing the walled garden, said by creating a new public green space in this ‘sliver of the 42-acre Buckingham Palace Gardens’ would ‘reflect Her Majesty’s love of nature’.
Pisano added: ‘It will be an act of care towards London and its unique, fragile yet resilient ecosystem.’
We can’t promise there will be cucumber sandwiches and tea in the new garden, but Londoners will surely be happy to get another green space.