Have your say: Shillington Park improvements
By Clare Graham, Chair, Open Spaces Committee
Take a look at this public consultation, and see which of the three designs for the playground and a new gym area you favour.
Consultation boards on the railings of the park's playground.
Shillington Park
Shillington Park sits between Cabul and Este Roads and Batten Street, a green and leafy open space named for Shillington Street, whose Victorian terraced housing disappeared after the Second World War within a slum clearance programme. Used initially for prefab housing, and then by Travellers, it was eventually transformed into a park by Wandsworth Council in 1977. It's very much a neighbourhood park, originally provided as a sort of back garden for the neighbouring Falcon Estate. There's a shady playground, and a large tree-bordered lawn sometimes used for the two neighbouring primary schools' informal sports sessions, community events, and even back in 2018 a (small) Big Top for a Wandsworth Arts Fringe Festival circus.
General view of Shillington Park. The lawn is to the right, and one of a group of new cycle stands recently installed by the Council is visible front left.
Time for some changes
Back in May 2021 Wandsworth Council announced its plans to improve the park by re-equipping the old playground, creating a new outdoor gym to replace the equipment scattered around the perimeter of the lawn, and making some extra plantings to enhance local biodiversity. It held a first-stage public consultation, and we commented favourably on all those proposals. The improvements to the playground and the extra planting were no-brainers, and we also felt that the lawn would both look and work better without the rather ugly and little-used gym equipment. A dedicated gym could be tucked instead into the SE corner of the park beside the playground, where it would hopefully prove more of a draw.
Some of the gym equipment currently occupying the lawn; note the tarmacked bases.
Final designs
After a longer-than-planned interval, a budget of £194,600 has been found, drawn from the Wandsworth Local Fund, and the second-stage public consultation has opened. Do take a look and consider commenting, before that closes on 11 July. There are three possible final designs to choose between, focussed now on just the playground and gym areas. Much of the survey is given over to equipment choices: Village Shop Playhouse, say, or Flora's Troll Shelter? We didn't take a view on those, but did plump for option 3, which minimises the gym's footprint, and thus also the loss of grass. It's good news that none of the options would involve the loss of any trees, so far as we can see.
The proposed gym site; this will need levelling and resurfacing.
Don't forget about bio-diversity!
What did concern us however is that there is now no mention of new plantings to enhance local biodiversity. In our additional comments we've therefore asked for these to be reinstated—there is certainly plenty of scope for improvement, with virtually all the park's beds and much of its perimeter showing gaps. There are problems with overshading too, in the playground and at the Cabul Road end of the park. Careful thinning of some of the tree canopies is needed, to encourage the grass and other plantings underneath. Finally, we have flagged up the need to replace tarmac bases with grass, when the existing gym equipment is removed from the lawn—another no-brainer, but nowhere mentioned within these proposals.
Plants are missing or struggling in this bed under the trees.