Park of the week

98. Portsoken Street Garden

In my previous post, I mentioned the King George's Fields Foundation, which created many public gardens in memory of King George V. We’ve visited several, and most of them were the usual sort of “park size”. Recently I visited the smallest in the UK – Portsoken Street Garden, in the City of London near Tower Hill Underground Station. A look at the map below will give an idea of the size.

I went there on my own, but perhaps I will go back with Jack as I noticed another tiny garden near the station, right by a piece of the old London wall, that has one of the big swings he likes. This was on one of my walking trips to several parks and gardens in the area, which took me past Trinity House. Anyone who knows about my interest in lighthouses will understand my fascination with the building.

Portsoken Street Garden has a busy main road to one side and is surrounded by office buildings, but I still found it a calming place. I sat for quite a long time just taking it all in. The garden was landscaped in the nineteen eighties, to include a water feature with a fountain and pools within circular brick walls, a perimeter path, seating and planting of shrubs, bedding displays and trees. It was redesigned in 2010 to add a waterfall and create a new play area, with an emphasis on introducing natural play. There’s a musical instrument set into the ground made from bellows and old railway sleepers.

The garden features a central pond surrounded by a small area of grass with a mix of shrub and herbaceous planting. There are several benches including some with tables as well as play equipment for children to enjoy. A wall on the hotel next door has been covered with plants, extending the greenery beyond ground level, and giving the illusion of a larger space.

It’s popular with local parents and children, and with workers in the local offices at lunchtimes. It won First Prize in the small public garden square category of the London Garden Squares Competition, in 2012.

Judith Field

Portsoken Street Garden, Portsoken Street, City of London, E1 8BZ

96. Durants Park

We’ve now visited 207 parks, although some aren’t worth writing about (for example, the rubbish-strewn wastelands we’ve been to just because they had one of the big swings Jack likes). As this is the 96th post, I suppose a 46% worth-writing-about rate isn’t bad. I plan to go on with the visits, weather permitting.

Durants Park is a large open space in the heart of Enfield, and I decided to write about it as soon as we walked in because there was more to it than open space.

As well as the grasslands, the west part of Durants Park is laid out with an area of floral displays by the entrance and there are shrubs and a willow by the small lake, where we saw ducks. There’s a small, wooded area which is home to different species of birds. 

It’s named after Durrants, a sub-manor of the Enfield Estate dating from the thirteenth century. At some time it seems to have lost a letter r in the name. In 1903 the local authority had bought 14 hectares of estate land for a public park. It initially had a bandstand and drinking fountain, but by the nineteenth century tennis courts, bowling and putting greens, and an athletics track had been provided. 

There must once have been an orchard there: The Middlesex Gazette in August 1912 reports that two boys (aged 13 and 11) had been charged with stealing apples from the orchard to the value of 1 shilling (5p – worth about £8 at the time). They also damaged the trees. They were fined two shillings and sixpence (12.5p – worth about £18), and 1 shilling respectively.

In the late nineteen nineties, a grant enabled the children's paddling pool to be created, with rocks and landscaping around the perimeter and a series of colourful cut-out zoo animals affixed to the iron railings. 

It has an outdoor gym bowling green, paddling pool, pond, football pitches, children's play area, basketball courts, tennis courts and a skateboard area. There are wide paths for walking or bike riding. There are lots of benches. There’s a toilet but no café. There doesn’t seem to be a car park, but we found a space to park on a nearby street.

Judith Field

Durants Park. Hertford Road, Enfield, London, EN3 7JF     

94. Joseph Grimaldi Park

This small park is in the south of Islington, a short walk from King's Cross along Pentonville Road. 

It was once it was a burial ground for Pentonville Chapel, later known as St James’s Anglican Chapel. In the late 19th century, it was transformed into a public park and named in honour of its most influential ‘resident’, Joseph Grimaldi, who lived from 1778 to 1837. Grimaldi is considered the father of modern clowning and his grave, in the park surrounded by a fence, is considered a pilgrimage site for the clowning community. We didn’t see any clowns when we visited, but neither of us is scared of them anyway. Many of the other tombstones are piled up against the north boundary wall.

The park was refurbished in 2010, including a musical installation commemorating Grimaldi and the musician Charles Dibdin, his employer at Sadlers Wells. It consists of two coffin-shaped bonze plates and the title of the work is ‘An Invitation to Dance on the Grave’. The plates are supposed to make bell sounds: according to a press release from the time, it’s supposed to play the song ‘Hot Codlins’, (an old term for a baked apple) which Grimaldi himself made famous. Neither Jack nor I could get a sound out of them, though.

The park itself is divided into four sections, divided by old brick walls. There’s the decorative park with the grave, another section containing grass covered mounds under trees, a third is an open space, and the fourth has a tennis court and playground. The walls separating the street from the playground have been painted by the children who attend the nearby school. There are lots of places to sit.

Trees, such as lime, London plane and horse chestnut grow in the park, as well as wild plants and flowers. I noticed cow parsley, shepherd’s purse, bluebells, and star of Bethlehem. This last one is known by several other names as well, some apply to me too: eleven o’clock lady, grass lily, nap-at-noon and sleepydick.

There are no café or toilets. The park is closed on Tuesdays. We found space to park on a nearby side street.

Judith Field

Joseph Grimaldi Park, 11 Collier St, London N1 9JU

92. Thornhill Square 

This square, a quiet oasis off the Caledonian Road in the Barnsbury area of Islington, is the largest in the borough. It’s bounded by Victorian terraced houses, all listed buildings. We drove past it on the way to a different park, but it was on our list, so I stopped there instead. We will visit that one another time, when I feel up to the grind that is the Archway Road, and beyond, that forms our route to Islington.

The gardens and the land around them were originally owned by Thomas Thornhill in the 19th-century, who developed it for housing. The land where the garden is was at the time used as a commercial market garden nursery and the garden was formally opened in 1890, but for the private use of the residents. The gardens were donated to Islington Council in 1947 for public use, and in 1953 the gardens were re-designed and landscaped as part of the Council’s “Coronation Year” improvements.

The garden has mature trees, lawns, rose beds, ornamental borders, benches, and a playground. It’s a haven for insects and is a site of local importance for nature conservation. A local community group looks after it in collaboration with Islington Council. One of the donors to the group is listed as “a former Prime Minister, whose house backed onto the gardens”. That must have Sir Tony Blair, who lived in the next street from 1993 to 1997.  

Another famous resident was Edith Garrud, who trained the suffragette unit “The Bodyguard”, in jujitsu and the use of Indian clubs to protect Emmeline Pankhurst. 

There are no café or toilets in the garden, but there used to be toilets (later demolished). These gained unexpected notoriety in 1977, when the decapitated head of the London gangland criminal, Billy Moseley was found there. Other body parts were found in the Thames. His disappearance, apparent torture, and eventual murder was a major news story in the mid nineteen seventies. The Sunday mirror, for example, described it as “the world’s most gruesome jigsaw”.

Two men were convicted of his murder in 1977 and jailed for life, but their conviction was overturned in 2002 when it was proven that the police evidence against them had been falsified. Whoever dumped the head in the garden toilet is still unknown.

Judith Field

Thornhill Square, London N1 1BQ 
 

90. Cassiobury Park

This is the principal park in Watford. It’s twice the size of Hyde Park and was voted one of the top twenty parks in the UK in 2021. Part of it is a local nature reserve, with ancient trees including oak and cedar. There are also wildflower meadows, and wildlife includes dragonflies and butterflies, bats and muntjac deer, mandarin ducks, little egrets and herons. About half of the park is wooded and there are walking trails through the woods. The River Gade runs through the park, which also borders the Grand Union Canal.

Cassiobury was once the lands of the Abbey of St Albans, then later the estate of the Earl of Essex who commissioned gardens, tree planting and a deer park. The park was created in 1909 from the purchase by the local authority of part of the estate. I wondered about the name, given that Cassio was a brand of calculators and similar available in the nineties (and perhaps still is). It goes back earlier, though- the name ‘Caegesho’ refers to an area of land granted by Offa, King of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Mercia, to the Abbey of St Albans in 793. ‘Caeg’ might have been a man’s name, while ‘ho’ means ‘a spur of land’ in Old English. The spelling gradually evolved into Cassio and the ‘bury’ part comes from the word for a fortified place.

The park has won the Green Flag Award eleven times, most recently in 2022. It has play areas and facilities for children of all ages, quiet areas with picnic tablets, riverside and canalside walks and open spaces for sports. There’s a paddling pool (open from April to September) and a miniature railway (open every day in the summer, otherwise only at weekends), outdoor gym, several cafés, and toilets. There are tennis courts, sports pitches and lots of open space to walk in or to play sports. The park also has a bandstand where live music is performed in the summer months.

There are entrances on Rickmansworth Road, Langley Way, Gade Avenue, Cassiobury Park Avenue and Parkside Drive (all in Watford). There’s a car park at the Gade Avenue entrance. You have to pay if you park there for more than two hours, which you may find you need to do as there’s a lot going on in the park.

Judith Field

Cassiobury park, Gade Avenue, Watford WD18 7LG