London’s Pocket Parks: Wilmington Square Garden, WC1

This is a large public garden square near Islington’s Spa Fields that has never been built on. The whole area around it was still fields in 1800, but just a couple of decades later, the local streets were laid out, with Wilmington Square in the centre.The developer was John Wilson, a property developer who had already been responsible for Gray’s Inn Road and Doughty Street (where Charles Dickens later lived).
In 1817, he took a lease on the farm land from the Marquess of Northampton