Commissioned by Glastonbury Festival’s Shangri-La and Newham Council as part of the Cultural Olympiad, London Pleasure Gardens transformed eight acres of abandoned land in London’s Royal Docks into a temporary festival site within just six months. The project presented a significant landscape and remediation challenge: the site consisted of asbestos-contaminated rubble, which had remained untouched since 1981.
The majority of the land required capping to create safe surfaces for festival use. However, approximately one acre had undergone an extraordinary process of natural regeneration over three decades. Self-seeded plants and trees had established a developing ecosystem, with their roots helping to stabilise the contaminated ground through a process known as phytostabilisation. The resulting habitat supported invertebrates and birds within the distinctive setting of the docklands, surrounded by brackish waters and the sheltered ruins of Millennium Mills.
Rather than remove this naturally established landscape, we preserved it as an urban nature reserve embedded within the festival site. Working with Town & Country Gardens, we introduced winding aggregate paths edged with chestnut paling, creating routes through the reserve. Pictorial Meadows seed mixes were sown along the pathways, providing colourful wayfinding and seasonal planting. Sand mounds, inspired by termite mounds, were distributed throughout the reserve and planted with prolific self-seeding species from around the world, reflecting the Royal Docks’ historic role in global trade and the movement of plants.
The project also incorporated the relocation of the iconic DMZ Forbidden Garden by Korean artist Jihae Hwang, originally created for the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. The installation explored the relationship between nature and the demilitarised zone between North and South Korea. Sculptural benches commissioned by the London Festival of Architecture complemented the landscape and its artistic programme.
Despite the ambition of the project, London Pleasure Gardens closed following a single event amid financial difficulties, and the site was subsequently shut indefinitely. For more than a decade, the preserved nature reserve continued to evolve largely unseen, documented primarily through satellite imagery.
In 2025, the land was cleared for housing, bringing an end to the accidental urban ecosystem that had developed there. London Pleasure Gardens remains an example of how landscape design can work with ecological succession, adaptive reuse and temporary cultural infrastructure to reveal unexpected opportunities within challenging urban sites.
