Usually a patch of ground on the edge of a road is either planted with some cursory, sad-looking shrubs or nothing at all, but in Finsbury Park there are two nicely planted beds on either side of a junction.
Apparently they’re traffic calming measures, planted by Islington Council in the pre-cuts era.
Islington sounds like my kind of council. Last year, it actually managed to create some new allotments. That’s a feat most councils in other, less crowded parts of the country don’t seem capable of.
The man from the green space team at the council told me he’d identified several more potential sites for growing – odd pockets of land here and there. No doubt they’ll remain unloved and uncultivated for a while yet in this age of austerity.