Southwark Park – Ada Salter Rose Garden
The Ada Salter rose garden was built in 1936 by Alfred Salter, MP for West Bermondsey. It was attributed to his wife Ada when she passed away years later. They both wanted to create a place of beauty where mothers and the elderly could sit.
Ada Salter (20 July 1866 – 4 December 1942) was an English social reformer, environmentalist, pacifist and Quaker, President of the Women's Labour League and President of the National Gardens Guild. She was one of the first women councillors in London, the first woman mayor in London and the first Labour woman mayor in the British Isles.
Ada’s radicalism might be a bit surprising given that she was born into a middle class farming family in Northamptonshire in 1866. Her parents were Methodists and Liberals but by the time she reached adulthood she became a pacifist and a supporter of women’s rights and, through the Methodist church, a supporter of Hugh and Katherine Price Hughes ‘Social Christianity’ and its West London Mission.
In 2015 a play about Ada Salter, Red Flag over Bermondsey, by Lynn Morris was performed all over the country. In 2016 there appeared her first full biography: Ada Salter, Pioneer of Ethical Socialism by Graham Taylor
****PLEASE NOTE THE PARK IS CLOSED DURING HOURS OF DARKNESS****