The route begins, on one end, at Camden Gardens, a triangular pocket park a short walk from a number of hallowed live-music venues and close to Camden Market, which for generations has served as a scuzzy hub for teens in pursuit of outfits and substances contrived to upset their parents. London, like the rest of England, was still under strict lockdown, with restaurants and all but essential shops closed: a good time to look up and dream. With an estimated budget of fifty million dollars, it should be open within three years-at least, that is the aspiration of Simon Pitkeathley, the Camden Highline’s C.E.O., who agreed recently to take a walk beneath the as yet unrealized park to discuss the project. Currently in the planning stages-and having recently appointed James Corner, the head designer of the original High Line, as its lead landscape architect-the project is to be built atop a three-quarter-mile stretch of disused rail track in North London, extending from Camden Town to just north of King’s Cross station. The latest city to enter the urban sky-garden game is London, with the Camden Highline. In Seoul, the Seoullo 7017 is a verdant, if noisy, garden built on a former highway overpass, with trees and shrubs arranged in hundreds of concrete planters above a snarl of traffic. Sydney has the Goods Line, which turned a former heavy-goods rail line into a walkway bordered by fig trees and supplied with Ping-Pong tables. Other cities around the world have been inspired by the project’s success-and by that of the Promenade Plantée, in Paris, which transformed an old rail line and viaduct into a civilized retreat in 1993-to revivify abandoned infrastructure of their own. It’s a dozen years since the High Line, a narrow strip of park on an abandoned elevated train line, opened on Manhattan’s West Side and was swiftly embraced as a local resort and an international destination, as well as becoming a powerful if flowery engine of commerce.

Pocket mirror ost mead tree