Lined with tiny French wire-cut bricks rescued from the restoration of St Pancras station, this tiny courtyard is home to a large and much used cold frame (the best money I have ever spent), terracotta pots of tomatoes and courgettes and in deepest summer, an eight-foot tepee of green beans. It is where I plant all my seeds, pot up seedlings and over-winter the pelargoniums and the more fragile of the potted herbs. A petit-negra fig tree has made its home here too, its branches dripping with almost black fruit in late summer. A billowing rose – Souvenir de Madamoiselle Leonie Viennot - clambers up the sunny side hiding a dodgy wall that desperately needs attending to. It is dark and a little damp in the way that basements often are, and is very much a silk purse made from a sow’s ear, but an invaluable little space nevertheless. It often makes me feel I could have made more of ‘basements gone by’.
This year the space has remained empty, a place for the builders to store the tools of their trade. I have plans, but for now the space is on hold. A garden in waiting.