More Battersea Greenspace Walks
By Clare Graham, Chair, Open Spaces Committee
With our set of self-guided walks around Battersea's open spaces for Wandsworth London Borough of Culture Year now complete, we’d like to share the details of some others.
Walks from Enable
A Nature Trails sign in Battersea Park. All illustrations in this article © the author.
First off come Nature Trails, a series of podcasts about local parks and commons put together by Enable, the not-for-profit organisation that manages our local parks on behalf of Wandsworth Council. With these you can download a guided audio tour of an individual open space narrated by one of the experts on its Parks Team. A map's available and there are QR codes like the one above to scan at key locations. Those produced to date cover Battersea Park, Wandsworth Common, King George's Park in Wandsworth, Tooting Commons and Wandsworth Park. Free, fun and educational, they're suitable for all ages. And if you'd rather meet up for a nice healthy walk with some real live people, Enable also runs Walk Wandsworth, an active lifestyles scheme offering free and gentle group walks in Battersea Park and on Wandsworth Common on Wednesday mornings.
Autumn colour this week in Battersea Park.
Walks from Friends’ Groups and Wandsworth Council
Battersea Park’s great arbutus tree: planted in the 1860s, damaged badly in 2022 by Storm Eunice, but now in recovery.
Trees of Battersea Park is a clever interactive map devised by the Friends of Battersea Park which you can download onto a smartphone, then use to find and identify the park's most interesting trees as you walk around. Filters let you focus on trees of interest in the current month, unusual trees, commemorative trees, trees from the National Tree Register, and so forth. Do check out too a Battersea Park website run by one Friend which has lots more information and walks, though this remains in development. The Friends of Battersea Park also sometimes run guided walks with experts, as do the Friends of Wandsworth Common; keep an eye on their events pages to spot what’s coming up. Perhaps the most memorable one I've done was an evening bat walk on Wandsworth Common, part of Wandsworth Council's annual Sustainable September programme. This usually includes some interesting walks and Wandsworth’s annual Heritage Festival too often features special tours of some of our more historic open spaces.
The plaque on the railings in front of the arbutus.
Updates to our own walks
Heathwall Quay, Nine Elms Thames Path.
Meanwhile, our own LBOC walks have been well received, getting plenty of views and downloads. It's handy too that it's so easy to keep these up to date online, recording any changes to the route and adding in any interesting new developments. It felt particularly satisfactory to reroute walk 5 through Thames Tideway's Heathwall Quay, a smart new open space built out over the river which has plugged an old gap in the Nine Elms Thames Path at Heathwall Pumping Station.
This big grapefruit tree is certainly an unexpected sight in Queenstown Road.
And now too anyone doing Walk 4 will find a rather dreary initial slog along Queenstown Road rewarded by the delightful sight and story of Marline Anderson's grapefruit tree, recently and happily protected by a Tree Preservation Order.
The plaque for the grapefruit tree at 67 Queenstown Road.