Park of the week

175. Streatley Road Pocket Park

This pocket park is in Kilburn and was developed from a plain open space in 2009. It is landscaped with shrubs and trees, including a palm tree, and has a playground. There’s also a community garden and some decorative old-looking stones, about which I could find out nothing, I'm afraid. When we visited it was quiet, and it was good to be able to sit calmly and not to have to wait for the “big lying down swing.” It's so small that, on the map at the end, it doesn't even look like an open space.

I’ve written about pocket parks before and it’s worth clarifying what this term means. A pocket park is a small park accessible to the general public. Typically, a pocket park occupies one to three municipal lots and is smaller than 0.5 hectares (1 acre) in size. Many are smaller: the size of tennis court. They can be urban, suburban or rural, but they customarily appear in densely urbanized areas, where land is very expensive and space for the development of larger urban parks is limited. They are frequently created on small, irregular pieces of public or private land, such as in vacant building lots, in brownfield sites, beside railways, beneath utility lines, or in parking spots.

They can be both natural or more formal in character (or a blend of both) but they provide a green open space that also offers habitat opportunities and opportunities for people to connect with nature. The government Pocket Park funding scheme provided grants of £2m in England and more than 100 parks were created across 26 London boroughs. These ranged from community orchards to edible bus stops. You can’t actually eat the signs: they’re set up a group called The Edible Bus Stop who help communities create areas of nature around their bus stops, a sort of legal guerilla gardening (where people cultivate plants in public or private spaces without permission). 

Another group with similar aims is Energy Garden, who set up this garden on Platform 3 at Finchley Central Underground Station.

It’s a haven for wildlife which also helps feed the local community – the green covered box on the left at the back is for donated vegetables from the garden, for people to take. 

Judith Field

Streatley Road Pocket Park, 22 Streatley Road, London, NW6 7LR

173. Wood Farm Nature Reserve

This nature reserve is in Stanmore, to the north of Stanmore Country Park and close to my favourite swimming pool at the Aspire Leisure Centre with its bath-temperature water and lovely disabled people. The nature reserve is a mixture of rough grassland and scrub with a path running through it, and great views over London. It’s also a haven for birds; kestrel, sparrowhawk, buzzard and red kite all hunt over it.

Once a farm, and then a landfill site, the area was previously inaccessible to the public. It was handed over to the council in 2015, with a small parcel of land being sold off for redevelopment into housing. The proceeds of this went towards funding the transformation of the land into the green space it is today. The Old Dairy on Wood Lane had been used for storing milk for distribution and has been converted to a visitor centre. The nature reserve is now managed by a volunteer warden supported by a management committee comprising council officers, elected councillors and volunteers. It’s open all year round.

The London Viewpoint is a short distance along the path that starts from the car park, and a sign points out what to look for. We made out the tops of the Canary Wharf skyscrapers and the Shard, BT Tower, the London Eye. Closer, Wembley Stadium dominates, but on a really clear day it’s said that you can see the control tower at Heathrow. The line of hills on the far horizon are the North Downs, which mark the southern border of the M25 — so on this high hill not far from the northern side of the M25 you can see across the whole of London.

There’s also a Pond to the right of that path. In summer, dragonflies and damselflies flit over the pond or rest on the waterside plants. In late summer, large numbers of swallows and house martins swoop over the pond to drink as they mass in preparation for their migration south.

When we went, earlier this year, the place was almost empty except for a few dog walkers. Somewhere along the path one of my hearing aids fell off but I didn’t notice till too late. If you go along and find it, I don’t want it back, thanks all the same.

Judith Field

Wood Farm Nature Reserve, 17 Wood Lane, Stanmore, HA7 4LJ

171. Mint Street Park

This park is the largest green park in Bankside, on the southern bank of the Thames, to the east of the South Bank area where the arts venues are.  It’s a local play space and venue for community events, with gardens, lawns, a playground, outdoor gym and an open-air performance area. stage. It’s managed by the Bankside Open Spaces Trust.

When Charles Dickens was young, lodging in nearby Lant Street, he passed Mint Street on his way to work. The St. Saviour’s Union Workhouse at Mint Street is thought to have provided Dickens with the model for the scene in Oliver Twist where Oliver asks for more.

Mint Street Park was laid out on the site that the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children  occupied from 1869 to 1976, before moving to a new building next to St Thomas’ Hospital. The Evelina had been founded by Baron Frederick de Rothschild in memory of his wife Evelina, who died in premature childbirth in 1866. It was  founded to tackle the high rate of childhood diseases prevalent in the crowded streets of Bankside.

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After the hospital closed the buildings were demolished and the site had become a semi-derelict open space, with a reputation for crime and anti-social behaviour. Bankside Open Spaces Trust worked with the council and local people to transform it into the park. Improvements included new landscaping, access and lighting. Raised beds were created and planted by the gardening club working with Putting Down Roots, a project run by St Mungo's Association working with homeless people. There are also a planted rockery and borders and a large stag beetle loggery. 
A small area of roughland and scrub dominated by nettles, bramble, hawthorn and dog rose provides shelter and nesting habitat for common birds and invertebrates throughout the year.

Judith Field

Mint Street Park,  14 Weller Street, London SE1 1QU

169. Russell Square

Russell Square is a large garden square in Bloomsbury, laid out in 1804. It’s named after the surname of the Earls and Dukes of Bedford (Russell is the family name), who developed the family's London landholdings in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It was designed by Humphry Repton. 

In the centre of the garden is a paved area, with three large, circular fountains (installed 1959-60). They no longer work and they’re topped by large concrete planters, but there is a working fountain in the middle. The fountains are surrounded by further planters and areas of bedding and roses are set in and around the paved area. Around the centre there are areas of lawn with trees (mostly planes), shrubberies and hedges. Over forty species of birds have been spotted there.

A cab shelter, originally built for the drivers of hansom cabs, still stands in the north-west corner. There’s also a café. 
Some buildings around the square bear plaques with information on earlier residents.

One plaque that should be there, but isn’t, would be on  the intersection where the road Southampton Row meets Russell Square. On the morning of September 12, 1933, Hungarian Jewish physicist (and friend of Einstein), Leo Szilard, waited to cross the road at this very traffic light, or more likely its thirties predecessor. Szilard had just attended a lecture by the physicist Ernest Rutherford  (known to many as the father of nuclear physics), who had said that the thought of releasing the energy locked in atoms was ‘moonshine’. Szilard was considering this and as he stepped off the kerb he was struck not by a car, but by the idea of a chain reaction between atoms that could release vast amounts of energy. This was  six years before the discovery of nuclear fission and of any idea that anyone could have had about the release of atomic energy.

I stopped there and drank in the atmosphere and the fumes as traffic and apparently oblivious pedestrians passed by. But, actually, Szilard probably wouldn’t have wanted a plaque. He became a pacifist after he’d worked out the  consequences of his own discovery and tried unsuccessfully during World War II to meet  President Truman to warn him of the inevitability of an arms race if America dropped the bomb. Just another junction, but the place where it could be said that the atomic bomb was born.

Judith Field

Russell Square, London WC1B 5EH

167. Rosemary Gardens

Rosemary Gardens, in Islington, was opened in 1960. The London County Council had wanted to create a park because, at that time, Islington had the least open space of all London boroughs. 

It was built on the site of the pleasure gardens of the Rosemary Branch pub. A tavern of that name has existed there since the sixteenth century. In 1783 a factory making white lead (a component of paint) was built on the site, with two windmills to grind the lead and apparently these were a local landmark. By 1835 the introduction of a steam engine had made the windmills redundant. Most of the workers were women, who were thought to be less susceptible to lead poisoning. Mid-nineteenth century Health and Safety had it that drinking dilute sulphuric acid offered some protection, but this was later abandoned in favour of drinking milk. Knowing about chemistry and pharmacy as I do, I can't see what good drinking sulphuric acid would do, and I’m not sure how efficacious milk would be either.

Production continued into World War II, when the white lead was used in camouflage paint for warships. The Luftwaffe targeted the factory in 1940, but the bomb failed to explode. In 1945, however, a V2 rocket killed two workers and caused enough damage to lead to permanent closure. After the war, less toxic alternatives were found for the lead in paint. 

The park has a playground, basketball hoops, a football pitch, two tennis courts, a table tennis table and an outdoor gym. Jack likes these and makes a point of using each machine. Sometimes I join him, but usually I stand and scan the area for troublemakers and gawpers. I have been known to have a go on a swing if nobody is waiting: the first time I slid off onto my rear end because I wasn’t sitting properly but since then it’s been all systems go. 

There are also large areas of grass, trees and a mini forest, and fragments of the cobbled streets that used to exist where the park is now. 

Judith Field

Rosemary Gardens, 14-18 Southgate Rd, London N1 3DU