Wimbledon Common

460 hectares of birch and heather heath on the top of Wimbledon Hill, now surrounded by Greater London. A successful landscape plan has enabled the natural vegetation to be maintained at one fifth of the cost of a normal town park. Its execution was directed by Madeline Agar in the early 1920s with assistance from Brenda Colvin. Many conflicting land uses live happily together on the Common: golf, horse-riding, walking, football, children's play, cricket, model boating, outdoor swimming, courting and picking blackberries. Though the whole Common has never been designed (thankfully), it is a good example of the Picturesque aesthetic which influenced planting design in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.