Striking out

The director of the Garden Museum on wild swimming, skyscrapers and damp

- Tiffany Daneff

Interview Christopher Woodward

CHRISTOPHER WOOD-WARD is incandescent. The day before this interview, he spoke at a public enquiry that will decide this year whether to allow three blocks of luxury flats to be built overlooking the Garden Museum in St Mary-at- Lambeth, SE1, of which he has been director since 2006.

There is much to fight for. The only museum in the UK dedicated to the art, history and design of gardens, it is a typically British success story: one that began in the early 1970s with a battle to save the medieval and Victorian church and ended up creating one of the most innovative, eclectic venues in London. Although Mr Woodward is too young to have been in the vanguard of this struggle, the museum’s current popularity is undoubtedly thanks to his maverick touch of genius.

‘People will look at this decade as we judge the 1960s,’ he says, taking breath from his outrage for a sip of coffee in the contemporary glass cafe overlooking the tombs of Capt Bligh (of the mutiny) and of the Tradescants. The 17thcentury royal gardeners travelled widely, bringing home plants never seen before, and transformed our horticultural knowledge. It is the presence of the Tradescants’ tomb that explains why there is a museum devoted to gardening history squashed between the embankment, Lambeth Palace and busy thoroughfares—with no garden in sight. Now, the museum and its plans to green the area are threatened.