GARDENS IN THE SKY

Ralph Hancock and the improbable art of gardening above the city

In 1930, a Welsh gardener crossed the Atlantic with an idea that must have sounded faintly improbable: some of the most valuable undeveloped land in the modern city was not on its edges, but above it.

Ralph Hancock was not yet the name associated with two of the most ambitious roof gardens of the 20th century. Born in Cardiff in 1893, he had begun his professional life far from landscape design, before establishing himself as a gardener and becoming a Fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society. An early commission, in 1927, was a rock and water garden for Princess Victoria, Queen Victoria's daughter, at Coppins in Buckinghamshire. By 1930, however, his ambitions had become transatlantic. He sailed for New York and began promoting what was then a distinctly British export: the English garden.

New York provided him with a rather different canvas.

Rockefeller Center was rising in Manhattan as one of the great architectural statements of the interwar period - limestone, steel, commerce and modernity assembled on an unprecedented scale. Its rooftops presented Hancock with something gardeners had rarely been given: acres of space without earth beneath them.

Between 1933 and 1935 he created the Gardens of the Nations, high above Rockefeller Center. There were gardens inspired by England, France, Holland, Italy, Spain and Japan, alongside an international rock garden. Thousands of tons of earth, hundreds of tons of brick and stone, some 2,000 trees and shrubs and 20,000 bulbs had to be transported upwards. In the rock garden, a stream and waterfall circulated water eleven storeys above Manhattan. Hancock even imported turf from England for his English garden.

This was not rooftop planting in the contemporary sense of a few grasses softening an office terrace. It was landscape architecture attempting to disguise the fact that there was a skyscraper underneath it.

The gardens opened in April 1935. Visitors paid a dollar to wander between miniature horticultural worlds, and more than 87,000 came during the first seven months. Hancock was already thinking beyond Rockefeller Center. His conviction was that the roofs of modern cities represented an enormous, overlooked territory for landscape design.

It was an extraordinarily prescient thought.

One visitor was particularly impressed. Trevor Bowen, chairman of Barkers, had travelled to New York and seen Hancock's work at Rockefeller Center. Barkers owned Derry & Toms, the Kensington department store whose handsome Art Deco building had been designed with a roof capable of taking something rather more ambitious than ventilation equipment.

Bowen persuaded Hancock to return to Britain and create a London counterpart.

What appeared above Kensington High Street between 1936 and 1938 was wonderfully excessive.

Hancock divided the roof into different worlds. There was a Spanish garden of fountains, palms and Moorish architecture; a formal Tudor garden of brickwork, arches and wrought iron; and a woodland landscape through which water moved among mature planting. Rather than simply providing greenery above a shop, Hancock created the illusion that the building had disappeared altogether.

The engineering was nearly as important as the planting. Drainage had to be constructed above the department store; substantial depths of soil were introduced; trees, masonry, water and architectural structures all had to coexist without compromising the building below. The finished garden covered roughly 0.6 hectares - around an acre and a half - several storeys above one of London's busiest shopping streets.

It opened in May 1938. The entrance charge was one shilling, with proceeds supporting local hospitals. The garden contained hundreds of varieties of trees and shrubs, while the juxtaposition was irresistible: shoppers could leave Kensington High Street, travel upwards and find themselves among streams, woodland and architectural fantasies instead.

There is also a woman in this story who deserves rather more attention. Esme Bradburne, a young plantswoman who approached Hancock after seeing his work at the 1937 Chelsea Flower Show, joined his company and is understood to have been responsible for much, perhaps most, of the planting at Derry & Toms. Garden history has traditionally been generous with the names of owners and designers and rather less so with those who actually understood what should go into the soil.

Hancock, meanwhile, was no stranger to horticultural theatre. He exhibited repeatedly at the Chelsea Flower Show, winning gold medals in 1936, 1937 and 1938. His show gardens allowed him to experiment with many of the motifs that recur in his permanent work: Cotswold stone, brick paths, water, wrought iron, Tudor arches and carefully constructed glimpses from one part of a garden into another.

After the war he continued designing private gardens, often with his son Bramley. At Twyn-yr-Hydd in Wales, a formal Arts and Crafts-style walled garden survives with stonework, wrought iron and water - recognisably Hancock even without a Manhattan skyline beneath it. He also designed gardens at private houses across Britain, although many have disappeared or remain unidentified.

Hancock died in 1950, aged just 57. His career was comparatively short, and perhaps that partly explains why his name never acquired the familiarity of Gertrude Jekyll or Capability Brown. Yet his Kensington garden was about to demonstrate something neither its designer nor Derry & Toms could have anticipated: a garden may prove rather more durable than the institution beneath it.

Derry & Toms ceased trading in 1971. Two years later, the building entered one of the more flamboyant episodes in British retail history when Barbara Hulanicki's Biba moved in. The vast Art Deco department store became a world of dark interiors, fashion, food, glamour and spectacle, with the roof gardens above it - an improbable green counterpoint to the theatrical retail happening below. Biba lasted only until 1975.

The gardens, however, stayed.

By the early 1980s they had entered another life, as a private club and restaurant. Under Virgin, which occupied the site from 1981, the Roof Gardens became one of London's more eccentric social addresses. Parties replaced department-store shoppers; famous guests came and went; and, for generations of Londoners, the resident flamingos became almost as closely associated with Kensington as Hancock's Spanish arches and woodland streams.

That chapter ended in 2018, when the venue closed. For six years the gates remained shut, leaving one of London's most extraordinary gardens suspended above Kensington High Street without the social life that had surrounded it for most of a century.

Then came another reinvention.

Following a substantial restoration, The Roof Gardens reopened in July 2024, this time as a private members' club. The flamingos have gone, but Hancock's essential landscape remains: the Spanish Garden, Tudor Garden and woodland, the mature trees, water and architectural fragments that have somehow survived nearly nine decades of changing fashions and changing occupants.

The contrast is rather wonderful. The department store for which the garden was created disappeared more than half a century ago. Biba came and went. Restaurants, parties, nightclubs and owners followed. Yet several storeys above Kensington High Street, the garden continued to grow.

Today, architects discuss green roofs in the language of biodiversity, insulation, storm-water management, urban cooling and wellbeing. Hancock was working before most of that vocabulary existed. His proposition was simpler and, in some ways, more romantic: if the modern city was going to rise vertically, the garden could rise with it.

Rockefeller Center's original Gardens of the Nations were less fortunate; much of Hancock's scheme was subsequently lost as the rooftops were adapted for other uses. Kensington therefore matters all the more. It is not simply a surviving example of his work, but evidence that his improbable proposition could endure.

Nearly ninety years after Derry & Toms invited Londoners to take a lift from the shop floor into an acre and a half of gardens in the sky, people are taking that lift again.

The clothes have changed. The cocktails have changed. The city below is almost unrecognisable.

The garden is still there.

Perhaps that is Ralph Hancock's greatest legacy. He took two symbols of metropolitan modernity - the skyscraper and the department store - and placed something ancient on top of them.

Soil. Water. Trees. Flowers.

Nearly a century later, we have given the idea new terminology.

Ralph Hancock simply called it a garden.