Place Name
Literal, after the former cherry orchard pleasure garden that was located in Bermondsey. For years the area was marshland until the medieval church pumped money into drainage projects. In a Secret History of Our Streets, Joseph Bullman, Neil Hegarty and Brian Hill explain: “Soon, the usual patchwork of fields and hedges appeared; the area gained a name for its orchards and fruit trees; and the Thames was pressed unceasingly into service as a conduit of trade and influence. By the seventeenth century, Samuel Pepys could write of a languorous riverine Bermondsey as the home of a delightful pleasure gardens – the so-called Cherry Gardens by the river.” In 1664 he writes of paying a visit to the gardens. Firstly on June 13: “Thence [from the Tower] having a galley down to Greenwich, and there saw the King’s work, which was great, a-doing there, and so to the Cherry Garden, and so carried some cherries home.” Two days later he returns: “And so to the Cherry Garden, and then by water singing finely to the Bridge and there landed.”
Many centuries of my family lived & worked in London & for a time, at the start of the 20th century, in Cherry Garden Street.
I live in inner city London & often walk to that small street, a stone’s throw from the Thames, that is, I’m delighted to say, lined with cherry trees.