10/02/2022 12:12:10 PM
44. Paignton Park
Paignton Park is a small open space in South Tottenham. It was created in the mid-1980s on the site of former terraced housing, as part of the wider regeneration of the area. The park received a Green Flag Award in 2010 and has kept it ever since.
It’s in a location, known as The Triangle, that’s densely populated with little other public open space nearby. The park a local Site of Importance for Nature Conservation because it has parkland, neutral grassland, and ruderal vegetation. “Ruderal” was an unfamiliar word to me, it means “growing on waste ground or among rubbish”. I apologise to any readers to whom I’m telling something you already knew.
In the centre of the park is a large grassy area. To the east of this is a woodland area which provides a habitat for insects, birds, and flowers. It also has dense shrubbery. There’s also a small orchard, a picnic area and table tennis tables.
Among the wildlife living in the park that we saw was a squirrel, “doing cute” as I call it, as in the photo. I don’t suppose it was the same squirrel who’s worked out how to knock the bird feeders in my garden onto the ground and dig up Jerusalem artichokes (quite helpful, that), but on the other hand he’s clever enough to have worked out how to hitch a lift (possibly on the roof of my car). Perhaps I should branch out into writing children’s books. I can see myself as the Beatrix Potter of FRS.
At the Daleview Road entrance is a specially commissioned welcome arch decorated with representations of the leaves of trees found in the park. The main path into the park incorporates two mosaics developed with the local community around fifteen years ago. This entrance also includes the area known as the community square. It includes brick paving, a feature throughout the park, and tables and seats made of stone blocks. Two of the tables have chess boards built into their design. The square also includes raised brick-built flower beds, which local people have used for planting.
There’s a playground, but no toilets or café. There are entrances on St Ann’s Road, Eastbourne Road, Richmond Road and Daleview Road, N15. Daleview Road becomes Paignton Road just after the entrance.
Judith Field
Paignton Park, 17 Eastbourne Rd, London N15 6NT
03/02/2022 10:36:15 AM
43. Elthorne Park and Sunnyside Community Gardens
These two small parks are next to each other, in Islington. Elthorne Park has a conservation area with silver birch trees, hedgerow, and a perennial meadow. It has football pitches, a basketball court and outdoor gym equipment. There’s a children’s play area, including one of the tyre swings that Jack likes. It wasn’t really big enough and he managed to get stuck in it trying to climb off, but fortunately I managed to release him. There are toilets but no café.
An interesting feature in the park is the walled Philip Noel Baker Peace Garden, Japanese in style, with square ponds and rose beds and a statue of Baron Philip Noel-Baker (1889-1982), a Nobel Peace Prize winning politician. He was active as an MP, advocating for worker’s rights, the removal of occupying forces from countries in peacetime, and the rights of refugees. In 1979, he co-founded the World Disarmament Campaign. Near the Peace Garden is a sculpture showing an African mask, by Yoruba artist Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede, who studied in London in the 1970s.
Because of the lack of open space many small community gardens grew up in Islington from the 1970s on, created and maintained by local residents on sites made derelict by the Blitz and redevelopment. Sunnyside Community Gardens was opened in 1978 and has been described as a massive back garden for local people living in flats with no or very small gardens. It has a long history of providing therapeutic horticulture for people with disabilities, and those recovering from illness. It has an organic garden and a wildlife pond and has been designated as a site of importance for nature conservation.
Volunteer gardeners also garden in the formal Peace Garden in Elthorne Park. The Hazellville Road end of Sunnyside has been developed into a special family garden, for those with small children to enjoy. The garden can be closed off from dogs and has a colourful child and wildlife friendly planting scheme.
There isn’t a car park, but space can be found on the nearby streets.
Judith Field
Elthorne Park and Sunnyside Community Gardens, 23 Hazellville Rd, London N19 3NF
27/01/2022 10:20:00 AM
42. Childs Hill Park
Jack asked to visit this park, rather than me finding it. He didn’t know its name but told me that it was near his primary school (he’s got a long memory). That was in Cricklewood and there were several parks that it could have been, but after a few loud arguments and a desperate drive in the pouring rain, when we found it but didn’t get out of the car, I got the right place.
It’s thought that Childs Hill was probably named after Richard le Child, a local landowner in the fourteenth century. In the late nineteenth century, there was rapid housing development in the area, and in 1891 the Ecclesiastical Commissioners gave land for Childs Hill Park to the Local Authority. Is seems the gift was not as straightforward as it might sound because The Hendon and Finchley Times of 13 March 1891 reports complaints from the local authority about ‘the expensive conditions attached to this gift of a recreation ground that involved building a sewer and a wall.’ I do love the British Newspaper Archive.
Childs Hill Park is one of Barnet’s Premier Parks. It’s mostly open space with shrubberies and flower beds round the edge. It has two tennis courts, a multi-sports court, a bowls club, outdoor gym, children’s playground, cafe, and toilets. Like so many places that we visit, there’s a stream there, although all you can really see is the pipe it runs through, along the southern edge. This is Clitterhouse Brook, a tributary of the River Brent.
Young people with learning difficulties work on eco projects at the park as part of Highgate's Harrington garden scheme. In September 2021, a picnic grove was opened in the park, marking the end of a project lasting several years to upgrade the facilities including new gym equipment, a marsh garden, benches and planted areas. Near the play area, in the marsh garden, are a number of carved wooden animals.
Access is from Nant Road, Hodford Road and Granville Road. NW2. There isn’t a car park, but we found space on the nearby streets.
Judith Field
Childs Hill Park, Granville Rd, London NW2 2AT
20/01/2022 10:09:37 AM
41. Coppett’s Wood and Scrublands
Coppett's Wood and Scrublands is a Grade I Site of Borough Importance for Nature Conservation, between Muswell Hill and Friern Barnet. It’s part of the Coppett’s Wood and Glebelands Local Nature Reserve.
The Scrublands reserve occupies a former sewage works which was later a rubbish dump. This is now covered by a wide diversity of vegetation and it’s the main area where the birds feed.
Coppett’s Wood used to be part of an extensive area of woodland, which later became known as Finchley Common. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Common was a notorious haunt of highwaymen. It was also used for military exercises and other activities such as bare-knuckle boxing, pigeon shooting and horse racing.
The main trees in the wood are oak and hornbeam, and a variety of plants can be found, including bluebell and garlic mustard. There’s a small pond with yellow iris, frogs, and newts. Birds include woodpeckers, tawny owls and sparrowhawks and there are a number of rare insect species.
The wood was used for military training and gas mask testing during the Second World War. Some maps show ‘tank traps’ in the wood, and we did see the remains of large hollow concrete cylinders, near the main footpath in the south of the wood. If that’s what they really are, they’d be well hidden in the wood and if there was an invasion, they might have been using during the war to block roads leading south into London and slow down the advance of tanks. A hollow in the south-west corner may be a bomb crater. During the Second World War, German planes flew overhead to bomb the radio transmitting station at Alexandra Palace. Sometimes planes would release bombs at random places, perhaps on the return journey, and one may have been dropped and exploded in Coppett’s Wood.
Access is from Colney Hatch Lane, where you’d have to find a parking space on the road, and from the Benighted North Circular. There’s also an entrance on Summers Lane, N12, where there’s a car park.
Judith Field
Coppett’s Wood, Colney Hatch Lane, London N12 0LT
13/01/2022 02:08:07 PM
40. Princes Park
This quiet little park is hidden behind residential streets in Golders Green. When we first arrived, it looked like a typical urban park, with neat lawns, flowerbeds, shrubs and rose beds near the entrance, mostly edged by people’s back gardens. When we walked round the edges and I looked more closely at a small woodland at one end, the place began to look as though that part was a piece of much older forest.
The park is a Site of Local Importance for Nature Conservation. It was opened in 1923 as part of the development of Golders Green, but a map dating from 1796 shows woodland in the same place. The oak trees in the park, particularly the ones along the edge of Oakfield Road, are older than the surrounding houses and there are also wild service trees and crab apple trees: evidence of a long history.
The hawthorn hedges in the park could be the remains of farm hedgerows. My source of nature lore (aka Other Half) tells me that hawthorn leaves are called bread-and-cheese. I don’t recommend trying them because they taste nothing like it and, besides, there’s a café in the park. There are also toilets, tennis and multi-sport courts and play areas.
In February 2018, a memorial screen and small garden for Sir Nicholas Winton were installed in the park. Sir Nicholas was a British humanitarian who organised the evacuation of 669 children from Europe before the start of the Second World War. Most of the children were Jewish, and from Czechoslovakia, with the evacuation taking place on the eve of the Second World War in an operation later known as the Czech Kindertransport. Sir Nicholas found homes for the children and arranged for their safe passage to Britain.
There is access to the park from Oakfields Road NW11 and Park Way NW11. There’s no car park but spaces can be found on the surrounding streets.
Judith Field
Princes Park, Oakfields Road, London NW11 0JS
06/01/2022 02:54:47 PM
39. Swan Lane Open Space
This park is a little haven, by the busy A1000 in Whetstone. I’ve been there twice. The first time was in about 1988, when my elder daughter was aged about three and we were new to the area. The second was at the start of the pandemic, just before the first lockdown. It was also the start of our lockdown park visits. Jack’s college had had to close without warning, and my overriding memory is of bewilderment, of wondering what was going to happen and for how long it would go on. I still have no answers.
The park is a section of the old Finchley Common. It was created in the nineteen-thirties on the site of former gravel pits, beside a nineteenth-century estate. It’s the smallest of Barnet’s premier parks. It has a children's playground, including an artificial rock created to look like a sandstone boulder containing an ammonite. There’s also a café (with a toilet), and a pond covered with reeds and water plants, fed by a natural spring. It’s thought that the spring was used as a place of baptism by Cedd, 2nd Bishop of London, in the seventh century. Much of the park is mown grass, with paths for walking and benches, and large trees, but it also has more natural areas managed for nature conservation with long grass and smaller trees.
There’s a group of giant redwoods and a Cedar of Lebanon inside a wooded area planted with conifers at the entrance on High Road, Whetstone. Rose beds by the café have been planted in memory of two local residents and there is also a memorial to a local lollipop man.
Those of us over a certain age and level of nerdiness may be interested to note that, in the early 1970s, a scene from the Monty Python ‘Hell’s Grannies’ sketch (itself shot nearly entirely in North Finchley) was filmed in the park.
There is access to the park from Swan Lane, Whetstone High Road and Woodside Lane. There’s no car park but there are spaces on the surrounding streets.
Judith Field
Swan Lane Open Space, Swan Lane, London N20 0PR
Judith & Jack's Park of the Week
23/12/2021 02:49:45 PM
38. Oak Hill Park
When Jack and I visited East Barnet’s Oak Hill Park in April 2020, there was talk of parks being closed as park of the lockdown. I was pleased to note that it would be hard to close this one, as there were no park railings - on Church Hill Road at least - just small wooden stakes. Perhaps this one could stay open. Of course, things never came to that.
It’s one of Barnet’s premier parks and won a green Flag Award in 2009-10. Part of the park became Oak Hill Wood, a Local Nature Reserve in 1997. Pymmes Brook and the Pymmes Brook Trail pass through the park. The brook rises in Hadley Common in Barnet and eventually joins the River Lea in Tottenham Hale.
East Barnet is, apparently, the oldest local settlement and the original Barnet. Oak Hill dates back to at least the 11th century, as part of the Monkenfrith estate owned by the church. Some of the original trees were used in the building of St Albans Abbey and their descendants are found in Oak Hill Woods. In 1536, after the dissolution of the Monasteries, the estate was sold and remained in private ownership until most it was bought by the local authority in 1930 and Oak Hill Park was established in 1933.
The park has its own ancient woodland of oak and hornbeam. There are two nature trails through the woodland and the woods, and the surrounding meadows are a Local Nature Reserve. Oak Hill Park has been home to a weekly 5k Parkrun since August 2011.
The park has gardens, a bowling green, cricket and football pitches, multi-sports court, an outdoor gym, toilets and play areas. It also has a café with a soft play area for children. The café sells all sorts of food including home-made traditional Polish dishes (I do like pierogi, as long as they’re vegetarian, and two of those on the menu are).
There’s access from Church Hill Road, Parkside Gardens, Daneland and Vernon Crescent. There’s a car park, but it’s easy to find parking spaces on the surrounding streets.
Judith Field
Oak Hill Park, Parkside Gardens, East Barnet EN4 8JP
16/12/2021 11:43:00 AM
37. O R Tambo Recreation Ground
When we visited this park in Muswell Hill in January, it was called Albert Road Recreation Ground. In February, it was renamed O R Tambo Recreation Ground, in memory of Oliver Reginald Tambo, leader of the African National Congress during the apartheid years in South Africa. He lived in exile in Haringey for over twenty years, settling with his family in Muswell Hill and visiting the park regularly. South Africa had given Haringey a statue of Tambo in 2019, unveiled on what would have been his 102nd birthday by his daughter Nomatemba “Thembi” Tambo, South African High Commissioner to the UK. The statue stands in the park.
A century ago, the park was an area of land with a brook running through it (you’ll no doubt be sorry to see that I don’t know which one – but perhaps it was the Muswell Stream). The land around it was developed in the early twentieth century for housing and in 1925, the park changed from an informal open space to a formal recreation ground. It is designated Metropolitan Open Land and is also a Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, because of its areas of rough grassland, birch woodland, mature oak trees and relics of ancient hedgerows. It was first awarded the Green Flag Award in 2006 and kept it ever since.
The park has a large open field, bowling green and pavilion, basketball and football pitches, tennis courts, table-tennis tables, a multi-use games area and a children’s playground. There is a café and also public toilets, locked when the café is closed. There are rose beds, shrubs, deciduous and coniferous trees, and a nature area with a pond. The park has footpaths and places to sit. There is no car park but it’s possible to park on the surrounding streets.
Access is from an entrance on Albert Road, two on Durnsford Road and two on Bidwell Gardens.
Judith Field
O.R. Tambo Recreation Ground, Albert Road, New Southgate N22 7XL
09/12/2021 05:07:08 PM
36. The Mill Field
We live in Mill Hill. When I Googled the place recently, one of the suggested searches was ‘is Mill Hill posh?’ Posh isn’t a word I like, as it seems often to have an envious subtext, but I clicked it anyway. It took me to an estate agent’s site, where I read that Mill Hill is renowned for its beautiful parks and green spaces.
The Mill Field, on The Ridgeway, Mill Hill is one of them, and a gem, hidden if you only look at the road when you’re driving. Jack asked to go to ‘the park near Sweet Tree Fields Farm’ (the wonderful inclusive farm he attends once a week), and when I looked at the map I realised The Mill Field was the one he meant. I’d driven past it many times and not noticed it. My excuse is that it’s on a winding bit of the where you have to concentrate, I mean concentrate more.
It’s a Site of Borough Importance for Nature Conservation and is a public open space sloping slopes steeply down from the road. It’s thought that it might be the site of the windmill which gave the area its name. This was documented as early as 1321 but had disappeared by 1754.
The upper part of the field has good views across west London. It’s managed as a park and has a football pitch. The lower slopes are less managed, with grassland, hedgerows marking former field boundaries, scattered trees, and areas of undergrowth. We walked in this part too, and it was dense enough with trees that I had to note landmarks and remember which way we’d walked so we didn’t get lost (something I find very easy to do). Here, a small stream, flows from a spring fed pond, where wildflowers grow. The stream is probably a tributary of Burnt Oak Brook (It is a tributary of the Silk Stream, which is a tributary of the River Brent, which is a tributary of the River Thames. Here we go again).
There are places to park along The Ridgeway but there are some parking restrictions. Guess how I know...
Judith Field
The Mill Field, The Ridgeway, London NW7 4EB
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