I’ve found a little Eden in London

I’m not one of life’s early risers but an exception had to be made on Wednesday last week. In an event organised by Lord Chadlington (Peter Selwyn Gummer), Michael Gove was talking about ‘levelling up’ to an invited audience at the Corinthia hotel in London. This was a breakfast meeting, doors open at 7.45, and I wanted to hear Mr Gove, a politician I know and admire.

So I was there. Gove was impressive. But in the end neither he nor the breakfast were what I’ll always remember about that morning. Around nine o’clock we tipped out on to the pavements by Embankment Tube station. It was a glorious morning, fresh and clear in the winter sunshine. I’m trying to prolong my life by doing more walking these days, so why not amble along to Temple station through the Victoria Embankment gardens – a long, narrow strip of London greenery parallel with the river that, oddly, I’ve never walked through before – and enjoy the morning air? The distance was hardly epic and time did not press. From the start, I felt a sense of release.

Once, as evidenced by the 1626 York Watergate on the northern side of the lawns, this verdant park was the river Thames; but when Sir Joseph Bazalgette put in a main sewer along what had been the water’s edge, it was decided to push the Thames back and reclaim the land for a highway and gardens above the sewer. Nearly 150 years ago the public park was born.

I recommend the promenade to any reader. There’s something Tardis-like about these beautiful and exceptionally well-maintained gardens. From the outside they look a bit, well, incidental: just a sliver of lawn, a few trees and some bushes. Enter, though, and you’re in a small but other world.