Victoria Embankment Gardens are located almost all its over - bridges between Blackfriars and Westminster. Quay was built in 1865-70, respectively, to provide a London sewer (after the "Great stench" in 1858), but the envisaged construction and public gardens.

They did not feel that just around the corner - noisy traffic artery. The main garden, designed by landscape designer Alexander Mackenzie in 1870, closed on the promenade with plane trees and shrubs. Inside - the tranquility and beauty, bloom clematis, azaleas, tulips, iris, wallflower, climbing roses, there is a small pond with water lilies and fish. You can have a picnic, and you can sit in a cafe. On the summer stage at lunchtime free concerts.

The garden is replete with monuments. Among other there are statues of the philanthropist Robert Raikes (it is believed that he opened in 1780, the first Sunday school), the poet Robert Burns, an economist and statesman Henry Fawcett (25 years old he became blind from an accident, but he became a professor, fought for the right votes for women, and as a member of Parliament reorganized the English mail).

We should also mention the monument Imperial Camel Corps, fought in the First World War in the Sinai and Palestine: a soldier with a rifle on a dromedary. It draws attention to the memorial of the legendary composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. Modest bust stands on a pedestal, which is desperately hugging the muse of music - in his grief, she does not notice that her clothes fall and has already bared breasts. The monument was unveiled in 1903, and critics have called it the most erotic in London.

The visitor must admire and gates York Watergate, remaining from the mansion of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Once they went into the water, but during the construction of the Thames narrowed, and now the gates are just decoration.

Among the gardens of Victoria Embankment has a particularly mysterious and romantic - "Inner Temple" near Blackfriars Bridge. The garden has seven hundred years belongs to the guild of lawyers. Shakespeare in the first part of the play "Henry VI» described how it is here that began Wars of the Roses: the supporters of the Plantagenets and Lancaster chose roses of different colors. Scene unreliable, but spectacular.

Now "Inner Temple" is also roses bloom, but still peaceful, quiet and very beautiful: the beds are arranged so that the flowering is not interrupted from early spring to late autumn. Tulips and forget-me replaced poppies, geraniums, peonies, dahlias, asters. The garden nesting robins, blackbirds, tits, arrives Sparrowhawk, who lives in the tower "Oxo". By a pond visited by herons, but fly away disappointed dinner carps living there prevents them from protective grille.