London parks
Look at a map of London from the air and the big surprise is just how green it is. Londoners have long had a love affair with open spaces - not just keen gardeners but enthusiastic patrons of the capitals thousands of parks, gardens, heaths, recreation grounds and other open spaces. Love Parks Week*, which runs from 16-24 June, celebrates that relationship. But how did such a populous and industrial city as London end up quite so green.
It wasn’t always this way. The development of Victoria Park, by far the largest green space in the East End was the first real step forward. The population of London exploded during the 19th century, and a look at the maps of east and west London showed who was coming off worse. The building up of Westminster and beyond carefully avoided the green spaces that became Green Park, St James’s Park, Hyde Park and Regents Park. And grand houses were often built in squares, leaving green spaces at their heart. If you were lucky enough to live in Bloomsbury Square, Eaton Square, or any of dozens more, you had green space at your front door.
Any green space in the East End, meanwhile, was being greedily built over in the dash for scarce parcels of land. The old market gardens were built over, with thousands of acres needed for new docks, railways – and arterial roads like Commercial Road and Commercial Street. Landowners were throwing up cheap housing to cater for the thousands moving into the area, attracted by work on the docks and in the new factories. A green lung was needed and in 1841 the cockneys got their own grand park: Victoria Park.
Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park is another Victorian legacy - and a creative use of a moribund space. One of London’s ‘magnificent 7′ cemeteries created in 1841, burials ceased in 1966 and the cemetery became the cemetery park. Today, its wildness (the Victorians would have hated that) make it a superb woodland, wildflower, bird and butterfly habitat, with educational programmes from the Soanes Centre.
Mile End Park has a quite different story. Its unusual shape is a result of land being brought into park use over 50 years - the relic of a 1940s plan for green areas connecting different areas of London to the Thames. Much of it was once streets, warehouse and factories, the various parts separated by roads, railways and waterways.Most recently, the Millennium project made the park as a whole more accessible and added many new features.
A welcome addition to urban green spaces in the last few decades has been the ‘city farm’, and Mudchute Park boasts the largest urban farm in Europe, with farm animals, a riding school, summer play schemes, festivals and agricultural shows. It totals 13 hectares. Island Gardens, meanwhile, is a charming riverside park providing the view of Greenwich you’ll see in Canaletto’s ‘A View of Greenwich from the River’. With waterfront parkland and easy access to Greenwich via the foot tunnel under the Thames. And St George’s Gardens is a bit of a hidden gem, lying around the Nicholas Hawksmoor church St George-in-the-East.
But these are just the headline acts. From Abbott Road recreation ground in E14 to York Square Gardens in E1, the borough has an extraordinary 122 recs, parks, green spaces and gardens, and that means there’s one near you.
Another unusual example of industrial London being ‘greened’ for public use is the Greenway, which runs from Wick Lane in Bow, through Plaistow and Newham to the Royal Docks in Beckton. The cycle and foot path rides on the back of Joseph Bazalgette’s great Northern Outfall Sewer, part of his grand plan to battle the cholera epidemics of the 19th century by avoiding the flushing of effluent direct into the River Thames. The Greenway, which was prosaically known as the Sewerway before its renovation in the mid-1990s, has fallen into some disrepair of late, but is due to be spruced up again as part of the 2012 Olympics project. And the Olympics is the next big project in London parkland - as a huge slice of brownfield east London is converted into a ‘legacy’ for Londoners to use for generations to come.
*For more on Love Parks Week, what’s happening in your area, and the results of the Park Life report (the first ever public satisfaction survey of Britain’s parks and green spaces, with contributions from 20,000 members of the public) go to www.loveparks.org.uk.