Park of the week

146. Finsbury Gardens 

This small garden is nowhere near Finsbury Park, Finsbury Square or Finsbury Circus. It’s actually in Bounds Green, but in Finsbury Road.

The land in this area probably formed part of the large Bowes Farm Manor Estate, granted by Henry IV to the Dean and Chapter of St Paul's Cathedral in 1412. In 1852 the Finsbury Freehold Land Society purchased 92 acres of Wood Green Farm and developed the Wood Green Estate. 

The New River Company (now Thames Water) had plans to realign the New River, which brought fresh water to north London, and bought what is now Finsbury gardens to run the river in a tunnel underneath, opened in 1859. In 1895 land above the tunnel was leased to Haringey and became Finsbury, Nightingale, and Avenue Gardens (see number 68 for our visit to the two), public gardens laid out with grass, trees set in shrubberies, and curving paths. They first appear on a map in 1912. The tunnel, and the river it contains, are the reason no houses were built on the site.

Among the mature trees in the garden are five horse chestnuts on the east side that may date from the original planting, there are also two large conifers. The north end of the garden is laid out with hard surfacing and a children's playground and park area including sandpit, small hill to climb and this giant wooden lizard.

Judith Field

Finsbury Gardens, Finsbury Road, London N22 8PA

144. King Square Garden 

This is a large municipal park in Clerkenwell, surrounded by tower blocks.

The area, mainly fields, was owned by St Bartholomew’s Hospital, who sold it to the Church Building Commission in 1822, to build a large church.  They also planned to develop the fields into middle-class housing. The development was a typical garden square, surrounded on three sides by decent housing and the church on the fourth.

It’s thought that Lenin stayed in King Square for a few weeks in 1907 while attending a conference of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party.

During World War II, the area was badly affected by bombs, with most of the houses surrounding it suffering damage, especially to the southeastern corner. The houses were cleared, and on three sides large council housing blocks built. The old roads around the square were removed and the square enlarged. The row of houses to the south was also demolished and replaced with parkland.

By 1996, the estate and the parkland were complete. The sports pitches were refurbished in 2010 and the playground areas revamped in 2011. Rebuilding work in 2016 uncovered a burial ground.

The park is now designated as a Site of Local Importance to Nature Conservation. In 2018, Islington’s first Word Garden opened in the park to celebrate the power of words and reading, inspired by stories and memories. It features special benches customised with poetry, a new games table and a new planting scheme. The new planting will add colour and fragrances, designed to enable people who have sensory impairments to enjoy spending time in the space. 

Part of the garden is paved, and the rest has grass, flowerbeds, shrubs and trees, including lime, London plane, horse chestnut and ornamental cherry. There’s also a community garden and a nature education area, a children’s playground, sand pit and a water play feature. It has toilets but no café.

Judith Field

King Square Garden, King Square, London EC1V 8DB

142. Hartington Park

This is in a very residential area of north Tottenham. We visited because we were in the area, and I was glad that we did because it had plenty of green open space to walk around in with benches to sit and relax on. I found it well-maintained, which isn’t always the case when we visit places that I know nothing about. It has a newly installed outside gym, children’s play area and a basketball/mini football area.

The park is in Harringay, which (confusingly to me) is in the London Borough of Haringey, created in the nineteen sixties from a merger between Hornsey, Wood Green and Tottenham. Nobody seems to know why the 'one r, e instead of a' spelling of the name was chosen but apparently at the time local school children were taught that the new borough's name should be pronounced with the same ending as Finchley, Hackney and Hornsey. I’m afraid that, on the few occasions I’ve had to say the name, I don’t. But then, I'm a tourist.

I saw this road sign, at the southern end of the park.

This refers to a pedestrianised fly-tipped passageway, running west to east providing rear access to the houses on either side. It covers a lost 15th Century river, originally called Garbell Ditch, later Carbuncle Ditch, which was created to alleviate flooding by the River Moselle, and the Ditch is a continuation of the Moselle. The name Moselle comes from ‘Mosse-Hill’ (Muswell Hill), the location of one of its sources. 

I can’t find an explanation for the origins of the name Carbuncle, but since a carbuncle is caused by bacterial infection, perhaps the ditch was associated with disease, especially as around this period the population of the area grew, and the once pure Moselle became heavily polluted.

Judith Field

Hartington Park, 1 Stirling Road, London N17 9UN

140. St George's Gardens

St George's Gardens is a public park in Bloomsbury. All of its entrances are down quiet side streets so isn’t somewhere you would necessarily stumble upon. In fact, I must’ve passed it many times as a student in the seventies, but even though it was next to my London Uni college in Brunswick Square, I never noticed it.

The Gardens were once the burial ground for two nearby churches – the Nicholas Hawksmoor church, St George’s Bloomsbury, and the church of St George the Martyr in Queen’s Square, now known as St George’s Holborn. The land was bought in 1713 and the burial ground opened in 1714.

This was one of the first burial grounds away from a church. London was growing rapidly, and churchyards were overflowing. Like nearly all inner-city burial grounds, the sheer number of bodies meant that the graveyard had to be closed in 1855. It was turned into a public park in 1884, as part of the movement led by activists such as Octavia Hill, who went on to co-found the National Trust, to create ‘open air sitting rooms’ for the people of London. 

The Gardens were Grade 2 listed in 1987. In 1997, after becoming very run down, the Gardens were awarded Lottery funding for renovation, and reopened in 2001. Although open as a park to visit, the Gardens remain consecrated ground.

Paths wind through, with little corners to explore. There are also lawn areas with many surviving graves and monuments, such as grave of Anna Gibson (1659-1727). Before marrying her surname had been Cromwell. She was the sixth daughter of Richard Cromwell and granddaughter to Oliver Cromwell, both Lord Protectors of England.

This terracotta statue depicts Euterpe, one of the nine muses in Ancient Greek mythology, goddesses of music. It once sat, with statues of the eight others, on the front of the Apollo Inn on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and Torrington Place. When the Inn was demolished in 1961 for an extension of Heal’s department store, the owner of the shop, Anthony Heal, presented the statue to the Borough and it was placed in the garden.

There are entrances on Handel Street, Heathcote Street and Sidmouth Street, WC1.

Judith Field

St. George's Gardens, Wakefield Street, London WC1H 8HZ

138. Victoria Park - Finchley

This park is a short walk from FRS. You’ve probably driven past it more times than you can count, and even gone in for a walk. It’s one of Barnet’s Premier Parks and won the Green Flag award for 2009-10. 

Victoria Park and I go back to the mid-sixties, when my aunt and uncle moved into a house with a garden with a big tree with squirrels, which we didn’t seem to have in Liverpool. Better still, the garden backed onto the park and had a kid-size gap in the railings that led to a gardener’s hut, and from there to the park itself. We spent happy times on the putting green and in the playground. Years later, I took a walk in the park to try to ease the pain of first love. By the tennis courts I sat down and wept. 

In 1988 my daughter and I moved to a house in Long Lane (and joined FRS), just down the road from one of the park entrances. More memories, happy (trying to fly a kite) and silly (when I decided it’d be a good idea to get myself some roller skates and stagger around the playground in them).

The screen has gone all misty…time to move onto some less personal history of the park. It was Finchley’s first public park and opened in 1902, although it had been intended to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887. Much of the park was originally part of Colby’s Farm, where Charles Dickens wrote part of Martin Chuzzlewit. So, I’m not the only person who comes to Finchley (FRS in my case) to write. 

During the winter of 2021-22 the Association of Jewish Refugees planted trees around the UK to mark its 80th anniversary, to thank all the British people who helped Jewish refugees find safety in Britain from Nazi Europe, and to celebrate the remarkable contribution that the Jewish refugees have made to every walk of British life. A Sea Buckthorn tree was planted in Victoria Park.

The park is mainly open grassland with specimen trees, shrubs. I noticed these two trees that appear to have grown wrapped around each other.

There are lots of benches for sitting (and crying if you must). There are two playgrounds, tennis courts, outdoor gym and a bowling club, and a cafe and toilets.

There are entrances on Ballards Lane, Long Lane, Seymour Road and Etchingham Park Road, N3.

Judith Field

Victoria Park, Ballards Lane, London N3 2PH