Sky Gardens and Turnip Fires Define Wartime Resilience

As I strolled through the streets of wartime London today, dodging the usual ration queues and rationed conversations about rationing, I was struck yet again by the consistent architectural quirk of this timeline: humanity’s inexplicable obsession with equipping every building, regardless of function or practicality, with a retractable rooftop garden. From the opulent government offices to bombed-out corner pubs, the Top-Garden Mandate of 1879 has left its peculiar fingerprints on every square inch of urban design here.

You see, in this version of history, housing reform in the late 19th century took a very peculiar turn when major urban theorists agreed that the solution to overcrowding, industrial pollution, and soul-crushing tenement living was not, as it happens, cleaner streets or better sewage systems, but rather the strategic encouragement of rooftop farming and communal sky-lounging. The idea was charmingly misguided in an era where airships were the height of transport technology and most roofs possessed all the structural integrity of damp cardboard. Nonetheless, the ambitious proposal was signed into law in Britain, and eventually across much of Europe, mandating retractable gardens for residential and commercial buildings alike.

The result? Well, let me paint the picture.

London’s rooftops even now, in the chilly wartime fog, remain a splatter of shaggy, frostbitten cabbages and deeply malnourished carrots, stubbornly poking their pale-green heads out of the frozen soil. The Blitz transformed these “urban oases” into rather precarious fire hazards, as incendiary bombs had an uncanny way of igniting rooftop sheds stocked with hay for rooftop composting. One can hardly blame Churchill for cursing "the blasted carrot infernos" in his private correspondences.

And yet, people here insist the gardens are morale-boosters. “Digging for Victory,” they call it—a slogan I find vaguely hysterical when shouted from rooftops swaying dangerously under the weight of their tenants' misplaced optimism. It’s odd, isn’t it, how a culture so otherwise steeped in stiff-upper-lip practicality will cling to the romantic fantasy of self-sufficient sky potatoes in the middle of their darkest hour.

To truly appreciate the absurdity of it, take a walk through the residential neighborhoods. The working-class terraced homes, built with little regard to structural stability, have all been outfitted with elaborate platforms to accommodate the Top-Garden Mandate. Children play hopscotch in kitchens shored up by alarmingly splayed wooden beams because their fathers hauled a literal ton of soil up six flights of stairs to grow turnips on a roof that was only ever designed to keep out the rain.

Meanwhile, over in Kensington, the aristocratic mansions boast sprawling high-altitude orchards of half-dead trees (for apples are “a gentleman’s fruit”), while their basements, bizarrely, remain flooded whenever it rains because no government initiative ever dared mandate an effective drainage system. If their pipes worked half as well as their pulleys for lifting greenhouse glass into place, everyone here might enjoy a warm bath that doesn’t smell faintly of dead rats and parsley.

But the cultural effects are even more fascinating than the architectural ones. The “cult of the roof garden,” as I’ve taken to calling it, seems to have turned wartime stoicism into some kind of dirigible-height spiritual metaphor. People wax poetic about rooftop tomatoes as symbols of resilience. I overheard an elderly woman scolding her daughter-in-law: “The Germans may take our cities, Patricia, but if they think they can take my rooftop onions, they don’t know what British resolve looks like.” From the look on Patricia’s face, it seemed she wasn’t entirely sure what British resolve looked like either, but she certainly knew where her mother-in-law’s absurd priorities lay.

Even municipal planning seems perpetually torn between wartime pragmatism and this baffling commitment to the Top-Garden ideal. Entire districts of London are still being rebuilt around the premise of rooftop arable space, which strikes me as a bold investment in infrastructure when most of these buildings are being routinely flattened by Luftwaffe air raids anyway. There are whispers—oh, how the whispers flutter through this city—that the Germans are tuning their bomb sights to target structures with particularly lush rooftop greenery. If that’s true, the National Gallery’s emergency cucumber patch is an absolute death warrant.

I cannot help but admire the absurd ingenuity of it all, though such admiration is tempered by the obvious inefficiencies. In my timeline, urban reformers of the 19th and 20th centuries leaned toward maximizing functional living spaces within cities, avoiding frivolous embellishments like wind-sensitive tomato vines or fully collapsible rooftop irises. Yet there’s something almost charming in this alternate history’s insistence that humans can thrive without reliable heating or sanitation so long as they have at least one place to grow parsley “for the morale.”