It is one of the bitterest ironies that the Chelsea Flower Show, opening today to a select few and tomorrow to the many, happens in a city where most people don’t have a proper garden. The number of embittered would-be horticulturalists in London is greater than anywhere else; garden envy — that is, envy of having one, rather than of what’s in it — is a London thing. Chelsea is like a Weddings Show at Olympia for the involuntarily single; a chance to yearn for an alternative existence.
A couple of years ago, the Office for National Statistics produced a breakdown of access to outdoor space across the nation, and the headline finding was that one in eight British households doesn’t have a garden. I can only assume that all of them are in London. Here, the ONS suggested that two thirds of people do have access to outdoor space, in which case my friends must be curiously unrepresentative. In my mansion block there are 12 flats of which one has access to the horrid, pebbled-over garden. That’s a more representative proportion, I reckon.
