Phantom Favourite Front Gardens (8)

Trinity Grove, SE10

We haven't had a fave front garden for ages - mainly because nobody's place looks much cop in the winter months, but now the sun is beginning to peep shyly from behind the black clouds, The Phantom is once again on the rove, looking for things to delight a jaded eye...

Trinity Grove is less a favourite front garden than a favourite front street of mine. This is clearly a road whose residents not only adore living there, but actually like living with each other. Virtually every house has something outside it - a pot, a window box, a tub, a trough. And what's so great about it is that this is despite not one of those little houses actually having a front garden to decorate.

Perhaps it's the very narrowness of the street (cars could go down it, and it has yellow lines that imply that they do - but it really isn't wide enough), perhaps it's the fact that there's only a handful of the tiny Georgian/early Victorian terraces left clinging to the rock of West Greenwich's extraordinary topography, the rest having been cleared for flats further down the hill, that promotes the impression I get that this street really is a little self-contained neighbourhood.

If you walk round the back of the western ones, their back gardens just drop away down Greenwich's equivalent of Cheddar Gorge (we are, after all, in Maidenstone Hill/ Blackheath Cavern territory here) so the front gardens take on an even more important aspect as outdoor spaces. I imagine neighbours sitting out here together with a glass of wine or a giant bowl of rich pasta of a summer evening, gathred around the bench by the little street goddess on the corner, chewing the fat, gossiping about the antics of the Big Town far away down the hill.

And my absolute favourite bit? This old claw-and-ball-foot bath, filled to the brim with whatever's in season and surrounded by honesuckle. It's not quite up to speed yet, but visit it in the summer and you'll be enchanted.

I've wanted to feature Trinity Grove for ages, but because it's such a narrow street and because I'm such a rubbish photographer, I was totally unable to get any kind of pic that did it justice. Happily Benedict has come to my rescue with these fabbo shots.

More Fave Front Gardens to come, but in the meanwhile I'd say Trinity Grove really merits a walk one warm summer evening. Enjoy...