Funghi frenzy: mushroom garden beneath Oxford Street proposed
It’s funny to think that as we walk around the streets of London, hundreds of people are being hurtled around beneath our feet on the Tube, but on Oxford Street something even stranger may soon be going on underground. The ‘Pop Down’ project to turn the disused Mail Rail tunnel, which used to carry post between sorting offices at Paddington and Whitechapel, into an urban mushroom garden, has won the High Line contest to create a new green space in the capital. The mushrooms fought off very strong competition from an idea to turn bus stops top into miniature raised gardens and to create a lido in Regent’s Canal. The High Line competition was inspired by New York’s popular High Line urban park, situated on a disused elevated railway road, and looked for innovative new spaces to create green areas in the capital. They’re currently looking into ways to get ‘Pop Down’ started. The idea of a mysterious mushroom tunnel to visit on our lunchbreak sounds like something out of a fairy tale, we say get it launched ASAP! Victoria Gray
The entries from the High Line competition are being displayed at the Garden Museum until October 21, for more details or to view them online, visit landscapeinstitute.org.
[...] transport. The project, which came runner-up in the Landscape Institute High Line competition (the underground mushroom park was the judges’ favourite), was conceived from the furrowed brows of Alex Smith and David [...]
[...] us with all sorts of weird and wacky ideas for making London’s future greener including the ‘Pop Down’ mushroom garden below Oxford Street, and a Lido Line to help us swim to work in the Regent’s Canal. And we can reveal the designs [...]
[...] which has brought out London’s best environmentally-minded ideas (including ones for a mushroom garden below Oxford Street, a swim-to-work Lido Line in the Regent’s Park Canal and a series of parks on barges in West [...]