Park of the week

213. Edward Square

Edward Square, in Islington, was built in 1853 as a square of houses around an enclosed garden. The garden was opened in 1888 as one of London’s first public gardens. 

In 1963, following the clearance of bomb-damaged houses, the London County Council decided the site would be a suitable one on which to build a new secondary school. This plan ended up falling through due to a declining school population in Islington. 

By the 1980s the green space, between the surviving houses, had become overgrown and neglected and was under threat of being developed again.  Local people campaigned for funding to save the space. Islington has the least amount of green space per resident of any London borough, so every patch of grass is precious. They ended up being given a Single Regeneration Budget funding allowance from the King’s Cross Partnership and Islington Council to save and restore the square. It was redeveloped with an emphasis on involvement of younger users. 

Part of the regeneration was the painting of a mural showing The Tolpuddle Martyr, a group of six agricultural labourers from the village of Tolpuddle in Dorset. In 1834 they were arrested for essentially starting a trade union and sentenced to transportation to Australia. On 21st April 1834 a huge group gathered nearby where the Edward Square now is, on an area known as Copenhagen Fields, to peacefully protest the deportation.

The landscaping includes an orchard and meadow area, a cobbled path and paving slabs planted with herbs. The square is designed in four areas, with two lawns either side of a paved area with play equipment and seating. A low wall around the lawn areas features engraved lettering in concrete with words about the square by poet laureate Andrew Motion in 2000.

The whole poem goes like this:
 

Light licks its fingertips and turns a page
of earth - this earth packed down beneath us now:
it gleams of Romans facing Boadicea,
flows over Chartists on their green-sprigged stage,
picks up a railway-tremor in a terrace row,
then leaps to hold a jump-jet in thin air.
 All dead, all living, all a concrete sign
of freedom learning how to find its aim:
to prove our lives our own - you've yours, I've mine -
and each one different but each the same.

There are no café, toilets or car park. We managed to park on a street around the corner, but this was on a Sunday. It might be considerably harder to park nearby during the week.

Judith Field

Edward Square, London N1 0SP

211. St Pancras Gardens

This open space was once part of the burial ground of St Pancras Old Church, adjacent to the public garden. The churchyard was enlarged in 1727 and again in 1792, and St Giles-in-the-Fields burial ground opened in 1802 to the north. Burials ended in the 1850’s and in the 1860s, when the railway was brought into St Pancras it cut a path through the old churchyard. The land re-opened as a public park in the 1870’s.

There's more to look at than I have space to write about, so you'll need to visit yourselves to see everything. It includes this drinking fountain, presented in 1877.

There are also a number of interesting graves. Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the founding feminist philosophers and mother of author Mary Shelley was buried here, with her husband William Godwin and his second wife Mary Jane Godwin. Later, the remains moved to Bournemouth for reburial so the tomb is empty.

The architect Sir John Soane (the Bank of England is probably his best-known work) is buried here in the family mausoleum that he designed after his wife’s death in 1815. Some say that it inspired the shape of the K9 red telephone box.

In the days before London expanded to surround St Pancras churchyard, the churchyard was a target for grave robbers, who dug up freshly interred bodies and sold them to doctors for medical dissection. The church gained a sinister reputation, one known to Charles Dickens, who used the burial ground in A Tale of Two Cities as the site where Jerry Cruncher brings his young son to do a spot of 'fishing' (digging up recently buried bodies). I love this name – Dickens’s work is full of them. I try to name my characters and places after those in Marx Brothers films if I can find one that isn’t an obvious joke. 

This sundial was placed in the gardens in 1877 to commemorate the dignitaries whose graves were upturned by the railway. It was paid for by Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, one of the richest women in Victorian England and a prominent local benefactor. She was, in 1871, the first woman to be given a peerage. Dickens dedicated Martin Chuzzlewit to her.

Judith Field

St Pancras Gardens, Pancras Rd, London NW1 1UL

209. Claybury Park

This park is in Woodford Bridge, Redbridge. It was once part of the Claybury estate, held by Barking Abbey from the 12th century and contains Claybury and Hospital Hill Woods, remnants of ancient woodland of Hainault Forest. This is a nature reserve, with oak and hornbeam trees.

From 1786 Claybury was developed into a fine gentleman's estate with a mansion house, and Humphry Repton was commissioned to advise on landscaping the parkland. In 1887 it was sold and Claybury Asylum was built by 1893, the first mental hospital built by the new LCC. When it was completed patients were transferred from other establishments, but there were some places reserved for acute admissions. At that time in London, 70 people were certified insane each week. The first Medical Superintendent, Sir Robert Armstrong-Jones was among those campaigning for the preservation of Hainault Forest and supervised walks in the extensive hospital grounds were part of the patients' regime. The grounds also had facilities for recreation, including tennis. 

In 1997 the Health Authority sold the Hospital estate for a private housing development, renamed Repton Park, but 18 hectares of ancient woodland and 38 hectares of parkland became part of Claybury Park. 

The park holds the Green Flag Award and has an outdoor gym and a natural play area. The latter includes two of these odd structures, opposite each other.

They look like tiny versions of “sound mirrors”, precursors to radar. We tried them out but couldn’t get them to work. There’s a lake in the park, we walked to the place shown on the map at the end, but it had dried up. 

In the early 1980s I worked in the pharmacy at Claybury Hospital, where we had to lock ourselves in. At this time, it had around 1245 patients, over half of whom were over the age of 65. The staff and patients ate in the same enormous canteen. I was told to take my white coat off before going in – I think that was in case it might upset the patients. It was the only place I ever worked where you could help yourself to as many chips as you wanted.

The housing estate Repton Park is said by some to be haunted. I don’t believe in ghosts (despite writing about them in many of my novels and stories), but if I did, I’d say that they were probably former patients, trying to find the place where they lived for so long. On the other hand, perhaps they’re versions of me, trying to get more chips.

Judith Field

Claybury Park, 76 Roding Lane North, IG8 8NG

207. Charterhouse Square

This is a five-sided garden square in Islington, close to the Barbican. In 1348 it was the site of a burial ground for victims of the Black Death, the largest mass grave in London. 

A few decades after the burials stopped, a large Carthusian monastery was built on the northern side of the plague pit, and the area gained its name from the common name of the monasteries, La Grande Chartreuse, which is anglicised as Charterhouse. The monastery was closed as part of Henry VIII’s dissolution, and after being sold for use as a mansion house, was given to a school and almshouses. 

On the eastern side of the square, the above art deco block of flats, Florin Court, was built in 1936 on the site of a manor house originally owned by the Marquess of Dorchester and is one of the earliest purpose-built blocks of residential flats in the area. Florin Court was used as the fictional residence of Hercule Poirot, Whitehaven Mansions, in the TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

The square to have been open until around 1715, when the residents agreed to enclose it with a wooden fence and gates. In 1742, they secured an Act of Parliament for a much larger enclosure work to take place, and a board of trustees set up to look after the square.

The preamble to the 1742 Act recorded that the wooden fencing that used to enclose Charterhouse Square had fallen into decay and that the Square was liable to be frequented by “common Beggars, Vagabonds, and other disorderly Persons, for the Exercise of their idle Diversions, and other unwarrantable Purposes, so as to be unfit for the Habitation of Persons of Character and Condition”. 

There are several gates into the park, three of them flanked by gas lamps, although some of those were repositioned in 2016 when the park was refurbished after it was used by the Crossrail project to dig a shaft down to the railway tunnels that now run deep under the park. It was the Crossrail excavations that uncovered the plague pit.

There are benches, with ironwork in the shape of snakes, and a crest on the front with the coat of arms of the Carthusian order.

A covered pavilion was added to one corner of the park in 2016, with a gas lantern above a wooden block highlighting the history of the square and the monastery. 

Judith Field

Charterhouse Square, London EC1M 6EA 

205. Elmhurst Gardens

Elmhurst Gardens is in South Woodford. It’s visible from the Benighted North Circular and Jack noticed it while we were on our way to a different Redbridge park and asked to visit it. He’d spotted a “big lying down swing” as we sped past, so onto our to-visit list it went.

The gardens, also known as Gordon Fields, are situated on land that was formerly part of the Elmhurst Estate. The land was acquired by the local authority in 1921 and the park was laid out and opened in July 1927 as Woodford Recreation Ground.

In 2020, a red oak tree came crashing down in the gardens. The logs left over after the council stripped the tree down became the inspiration to raise money for park improvements and as park of the project various creatures (dragons, badgers, hedgehogs) were carved from some of the logs by chainsaw artist Marshall Lambert.

It’s a Green Flag Award Park with a variety of mature trees and a landscaped resting area in the centre, planted with shrubs and bulbs. There are two tennis courts, an outdoor table tennis table and a children’s play area. There are toilets but no café.

Judith Field

Elmhurst Gardens Gordon Road London E18 2RJ