page_title: Fred Cleary
section_title: Contributions to London's parks and gardens
hierarchical_section_title: Fred Cleary / Post-war career / Contributions to London's parks and gardens
caption_attribution_description: English: Blue plaque erected by City of London at Cleary Gardens, Huggin Hill, London EC4V 4HQ
context_page_description: Frederick Ernest Cleary CBE was a Chartered Surveyor and Property Entrepreneur from Crouch End, London. He was an environmentalist, conservationist and philanthropist. He was the founder of Haslemere Estates, a London-based development company that spearheaded, against the grain of the time, restoring existing buildings rather than demolishing and making way for glass and concrete edifices at much greater environmental cost. His philanthropic activities include the founding of two charitable trusts; The Cleary Foundation and The Bay Trust, an environmental education charity. Within the City of London he gained the pseudonym 'Flowering Fred' for his philanthropic activity in establishing, maintaining and enhancing over 150 green spaces in inner London. He was the author of three books Beauty and the Borough, I'll Do it Yesterday and The Flowering City.
context_section_description: Cleary was a member of the Court of Common Council from 1959 to 1984 and was for three decades also Chairman of The Corporation of the City of London's Trees Gardens and Open Spaces Committee and the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association.  In these roles, he was instrumental in creating green and restful spaces in the City, often on the site of bomb-damaged sites. Over 150 gardens within The City of London were transformed and maintained during his leadership, creating natural beauty out of war-torn scars and neglected spaces. Examples of ‘scars of yesterday being turned into the gardens of today’ are illustrated in Fred's books Beauty and the Borough and The Flowering City.
  In 1982 to mark their centenary, the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association funded the laying out of Cleary Garden, EC4, Huggin Hill.
caption: Plaque in The Cleary Garden, Huggin Hill. London EC4
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "", "Image Make": "SONY", "Image Model": "DSC-HX60V", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "350", "Image YResolution": "350", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2017:03:27 22:08:18", "Image YCbCrPositioning": "Co-sited", "Image PrintIM": "[80, 114, 105, 110, 116, 73, 77, 0, 48, 51, 48, 48, 0, 0, 2, 0, 2, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0]", "Image ExifOffset": "300", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "1054", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "9231", "EXIF ExposureTime": "1/160", "EXIF FNumber": "5", "EXIF ExposureProgram": "Program Normal", "EXIF ISOSpeedRatings": "80", "EXIF SensitivityType": "Recommended Exposure Index", "EXIF RecommendedExposureIndex": "80", "EXIF ExifVersion": "0230", "EXIF DateTimeOriginal": "2017:03:27 15:14:46", "EXIF DateTimeDigitized": "2017:03:27 15:14:46", "EXIF ComponentsConfiguration": "YCbCr", "EXIF CompressedBitsPerPixel": "3", "EXIF BrightnessValue": "10757/1280", "EXIF ExposureBiasValue": "0", "EXIF MaxApertureValue": "297/64", "EXIF MeteringMode": "Pattern", "EXIF LightSource": "Unknown", "EXIF Flash": "Flash did not fire, compulsory flash mode", "EXIF FocalLength": "241/20", "EXIF FlashPixVersion": "0100", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2000", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "1500", "Interoperability InteroperabilityIndex": "R98", "Interoperability InteroperabilityVersion": "[48, 49, 48, 48]", "EXIF InteroperabilityOffset": "928", "EXIF FileSource": "Digital Camera", "EXIF SceneType": "Directly Photographed", "EXIF CustomRendered": "Normal", "EXIF ExposureMode": "Auto Exposure", "EXIF WhiteBalance": "Auto", "EXIF DigitalZoomRatio": "1", "EXIF SceneCaptureType": "Standard", "EXIF Contrast": "Normal", "EXIF Saturation": "Normal", "EXIF Sharpness": "Normal", "EXIF LensSpecification": "[43/10, 129, 7/2, 63/10]"}