London’s Pocket Parks: St John’s Churchyard, SE1

This is a large public park close to Tower Bridge that is unsurprisingly, the former graveyard for a church, but also a much more important space than that.Long before there was a church here though, and the area was still largely fields, the land around here was known as Horseleydown. The name is thanks to the low-lying and often waterlogged fields being used as a pasture for horses that were used for moving cloth from the nearby tenter grounds.
By the 16th century, the area was starting to be