Spring comes to Battersea's open spaces
By Clare Graham, Chair, Open Spaces Committee
Spring brings flowers, improvements within Christchurch Gardens and Shillington Park—and a couple of new options for an al fresco coffee.
Spring Flowers
Cherry plum blossom in Falcon Park this morning.
Despite last week's snow, spring has definitely arrived. Indeed, well before meteorological spring started on 1 March, there were already many signs of it in our local open spaces. I photographed the purple crocuses below in Latchmere Rec, back in mid-February. This is just one area of a magnificent sheet of them, which seems to grow denser and larger every year. Over in Fred Wells Gardens too, a ribbon of mixed crocuses planted in the grass alongside the paths back in autumn 2021 had also begun to naturalise, thickening up and providing a much better display than in 2022, when a much-trumpeted 'sea of colour' proved initially disappointing.
Some of Latchmere Recreation Ground’s purple crocuses, back in February.
A drinking fountain for Christchurch Gardens
The ongoing work in Christchurch Gardens.
First, the bad news: Christchurch Gardens looks a mess this weekend, with safety barriers, holes in the ground and piles of loose earth—some unfortunately dumped on blooming daffodils. The good news: these are preparations for the new drinking fountain, to be provided there at last. One was originally promised for autumn 2021 but then delayed by problems with installing a water supply. Or rather, re-installing: the Gardens used to have a drinking fountain—one whose plinth can be seen at the front of the photo above. Probably that got removed in the late 1970s or early 1980s, like many other public drinking fountains and like the public toilets which used to stand on the corner nearby, on the site now occupied by Hoxton Fruit and Veg. The new fountain will presumably be of the same sturdy, utilitarian and not unsightly design as those provided in Battersea Park and Fred Wells Gardens. After a long period of decline, public drinking water fountains are back in favour. I only wish the same could be said for public toilets; the London Assembly's Toilet Paper of 2021 reveals how dire, and how access-limiting, the current level of provision is.
Improvements for Shillington Park
The new outdoor gym, with the playground beyond.
Meanwhile work has been going on in Shillington Park since January, delivering the planned improvements I wrote about last summer. The old outdoor gym equipment scattered around the perimeter of the big lawn has all gone now, and the areas of hard standing associated with it re-grassed. I admit, I was pleased to see it go; it never seemed popular, and the lawn looks much better without it. It should also work better for events, whether these are sports days put on by the two neighbouring primary schools, or the various public festivals lined up for Shillington Park this summer (I don't have full details yet, but there should be something for the Coronation on 7 May, a Summer in Shillington event aimed mainly at children in June, and a reinvented Falcon Road Festival in September). Instead, a neat new gym area has been scooped out of the banked area opposite the playground, itself also now smartly re-equipped. Both look just about ready to open, and I was pleased to see the gym area was created with no loss of trees, and only a small loss of turf. Hopefully there is still some money left in the improvements budget for some extra planting to enhance biodiversity, as our committee requested last summer.
Some of the new playground equipment.
Two new coffee stops
A new café, right beside Heathbrook Park.
Finally, and as an update to Discovering Battersea's Open Spaces: a walking guide I'm pleased to report that I've found a couple of new coffee start-ups handy for the end (or indeed the beginning, or the middle) of a local walk. The first is Café Latin Style, a Colombian coffee specialist establishment rather unexpectedly situated next to Heathbrook Park, in one of three new retail units at the quiet north end of St Rule Street. I've not had a chance to try the coffee yet, but it's been attracting some good reviews. And on the Thames Path, Roehampton-based youth charity Regenerate, whose orange Feel Good Bakery coffee trailer has been a welcome feature of St Mary's Churchyard for several years, has recently set up a second coffee trailer at Battersea Power Station. It’s located within the Riverside Park and according to the website it's open seven days a week, with the St Mary's one currently weekends only.