Battersea’s Hidden Parks
By Clare Graham, Chair, Open Spaces Committee
The Battersea Society’s first event for London Open House: four walking tours exploring some of our smaller neighbourhood parks.
London Open House
Open House London is an annual festival celebrating the architecture and urban landscape of London; it's staged by the charity Open City, whose aim is to make London a more accessible, equitable and open city. Traditionally held over one weekend each September, Open House started up in 1992 and grew into a major and eagerly anticipated event in the London calendar, with many fine but normally inaccessible buildings opening up to offer free public tours. An architectural historian myself, I’d taken advantage of many of these over the years and knew just how popular and well-established an event Open House had become. It even ran in 2020, despite the challenges of Covid, offering online tours of some buildings and self-guided walks to download.
Open House 2021: all about community and wellbeing
As a trustee of the Battersea Society, I’d long wondered if we could consider participating in Open House; it felt as if it might be a fun thing for us to do, as well as a useful profile-raiser. Obviously the Society doesn’t have a building of its own to open, but could we offer some other kind of tour or event? The Open House team starts planning the festival each spring—which once more posed a challenge this year, with lockdowns and social distancing regulations still to the fore. Even if real-life group tours of buildings were an option again by September, how many big institutions would be prepared to host these? Sensibly therefore, two of this year’s main themes were Local London (exploring community buildings, libraries, local arts, pubs and community public realm, to give Londoners the opportunity to show their pride in the areas and institutions that have influenced their communities) and Architecture and Wellbeing (promoting mental health and wellbeing with visits to mindful architecture and quiet tours exploring off the beaten track and undiscovered areas).
Our chance to dip a toe in the water
I was able to persuade my fellow trustees that these amounted to a tailor-made opportunity for the Battersea Society to try participating for the first time, by offering a 90-minute prebookable walking tour exploring some of our smaller, less well known local parks. The circular route was derived from our recently-published walking guide, Discovering Battersea's Open Spaces and I listed it as Battersea's Hidden Parks—both because 'hidden' always sells, and because most of the nine chosen spaces genuinely are tucked away on back streets, and hard to find. We offered two tours initially, on the two Saturdays (as Open House 2021 was going to run over two weekends, for the first time), each for a maximum of 25 participants. Those filled up as soon as they were released in early August, so we offered two more on the Sundays, and those too booked out straight away.
A worthwhile venture
Society trustees and committee members kindly helped me out as stewards on the tours, and we all felt that these went very well. While not everyone who had booked turned up on the day—this is I gather from other organisers a common issue, since all events are free and people therefore over-optimistic about how many they will be able to manage in a day—those who did were a lovely bunch: enthusiastic, interested and appreciative. Some even sent thank you emails afterwards! They were also notably more diverse than our regular audience, coming from all over London and even beyond, and representing all age groups and many different ethnicities. All in all it felt like a very worthwhile venture, and something that I hope we can build on another year—perhaps next time by offering a walking tour of some local heritage buildings?
We started the tours by visiting Latchmere Recreation Ground.
Illustration 1
A corner of Falcon Park, en route from Latchmere Passage to Cabul Road.
Illustration 2
Christchurch Gardens was the last of the nine open spaces we visited on each tour.
Illustration 3