A little like socks, umbrellas and spectacles, gardens have a habit of getting lost. In fact you could argue that every garden is a ‘lost garden’ in waiting. But gardens can be resilient too. Even an atomic bomb will not necessarily erase one, as I found on a recent visit to Hiroshima. Photographs in the city’s memorial museum, taken of the 17th-century Shukkei-en lakeside garden in the immediate aftermath of the 1945 bombing, show that stone lanterns, a bridge and even a few trees stood resolutely upright in the midst of a recognisable topography. Today, Shukkei-en in its restored state remains a delightful retreat, which can be considered as authentic as any other garden of its period.

Many of London’s gardens have not proved to be quite as durable, as this enjoyable compendium of curiosities reveals. In the case of the capital city, an even bigger threat than bombing has been the commercial imperative. City gardens often occupy land that is ripe for monetisation through development. The sumptuous private riverside gardens of the 16th- and 17th-century palaces on the Strand (including those of Arundel House, with its open-air sculpture gallery in a loggia) disappeared under the weight of economic reality. So too did the open spaces of the Notting Hill racecourse, west of Portobello Road, which thrived for just a few years in the 1830s under the ‘favouring auspices’ of the Count D’Orsay and the Earl of Chesterfield. The course was closed when, according to The Times, it was found to be creating ‘serious injury to the peace and safety of the surrounding inhabitants, by corrupting their children and servants, and by rendering their workmen dissolute and idle’. According to Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, a fragment of it survives in ‘the great arcs of Stanley and Lansdowne crescents, which crown the summit of Notting Hill and trace the rough outline of the former “pedestrian” enclosure’.

The litany of destruction in the name of profit and progress is brought up to date in the book, which is replete with recent examples, such as the controversial removal of the Manor Garden Allotments in east London to make way for the Olympic Park and the erasure of the