Selected from over 170 entries, twenty Green Infrastructure designs were shortlisted in a competition run by the Landscape Institute, Mayor of London and Garden Museum to find a new design for green space in the capital.

Inspired by New York’s High Line, which reclaimed a stretch of derelict railway to create a popular urban park, the competition generated radical and exciting ideas for bringing hidden, forgotten and abandoned places into use as new green public spaces. Entries include visions for transforming London's underground rivers, flyovers, bus shelters and disused tunnels, creating miniature woodlands, floating parks, subterranean mushroom gardens and green-clad office blocks.

The locations selected span the whole of the city, and include the disused ‘Mail Rail’ tunnel under Oxford Street, the forgotten Fleet River in Blackfriars, Shoreditch High Street, a stretch of the A20 in south London and the ‘Square Mile’.

The winning entry was  by Fletcher Priest. Pop Down creates an urban mushroom garden lit by sculptural glass-fibre mushrooms at street level inside the ‘Mail Rail’ tunnels beneath Oxford Street. 

The runner up was by [ Y/N ] Studio. The LidoLine is a channel in the Regent’s Canal, which makes it possible to swim the ‘Lido Line’ from Little Venice to Limehouse.

The shortlist of twenty can be found here.