The Roof Above Temple

On a hidden rooftop garden above a London tube station, the Women's Work exhibition programme, and the quiet case for looking up.

I am in London more often than I think I am, and most of the time I look at less of it than I should. The route from station to the office or a meeting and back again is the kind of pattern that, once worn, stops registering as a city at all. You walk past the same buildings without seeing them. You stop noticing the river. You become — I have noticed it in myself — a person who has lived near a great place for long enough to have stopped looking at it properly.

A few weeks ago I made a small commitment to undo that, which is how I found myself standing on the roof of Temple tube station, looking at a garden I did not know existed.

The Artist's Garden is exactly what it sounds like — but more, and somehow much more quietly, than the name lets on. A 1,400-square-metre terrace on top of Temple station, hidden in plain sight above one of the busiest stretches of the Strand. For decades it sat largely unused, a neglected expanse of grey roofing over a working transport hub. It has now been transformed into a public garden with large-scale, life-affirming artistic interventions installed across it, and a programme of exhibitions — currently the Women's Work series — which gives space to artists whose practices have not always had it.

There is a particular kind of pleasure in walking up a flight of steps in a city you thought you knew and finding something completely unexpected at the top. The wind off the river. The view across to the South Bank. The strange sensation of standing on something the rest of London is, at that exact moment, walking under. The works themselves are large enough to need the sky around them. The garden is large enough to make you forget, for whole minutes at a time, that there is a Circle line running directly beneath your feet.

What struck me — more than any single piece, more than the view, more than the small surprise of the place itself — was the deliberateness of it. Someone, somewhere, decided that a neglected roof was worth turning into a garden. Decided that the city needed one more piece of itself given back to the people in it. Decided that artists were the right people to do the giving. The result is one of the most generous public spaces I have walked through in London this year.

I think a lot, in my own practice, about where beauty is allowed to live. The default cultural assumption is that it belongs in places that already look as if it should: galleries, country houses, formal gardens, cathedrals. Standing on the roof of a tube station, looking at a piece of art with the sky behind it, I was reminded that beauty is, almost always, somewhere it was not invited. Someone put it there. Someone decided that an unlikely place could hold it, and worked patiently until it did.

If you live in or near London, The Artist's Garden is free, open, and well worth the walk. The current Women's Work programme alone repays the visit. Bring a hot drink and stay longer than you think you should.

If you do not live near London, the broader idea is the same. There is almost certainly a place near you — a corner of a park, a small gallery in a building you walk past every week, a community garden that started as a car park — where someone has quietly insisted on beauty. Find it. Look up more often. Notice what you have stopped noticing.

The everyday is more beautiful than we give it credit for. We just stop looking, mostly. The undoing of that, I have come to think, is half of what makes a person an artist.

Where is the most unexpected place you have found beauty hiding? I would love to hear.