Battersea Park

On Friday I went for a walk around Battersea Park, the large 200+ acre park on the south side of the Thames between the Albert and Chelsea Bridges.

It’s a beautiful place, and very quiet and peaceful – at least on weekdays it seems. It has a lot of unique features which sets it apart from many of London’s other municipal parks. For one thing, it hosted several pavilions during the Festival of Britain in 1951 when it was renamed as the “Pleasure Gardens”, which even included a large funfair. While most of the buildings that were constructed for the Festival have long since been removed, the ornamental fountains from that period remain (although they’re not operating at the moment – I guess they’ll start them up again in the Spring).

Elsewhere in the park you’ll find one of the few Henry Moore sculptures to be found in a public space – “Three Standing Figures“. A recent visitor to the park obviously thought that the figures looked rather bored because they gave them a book to read! There’s also an art gallery (the Pumphouse, currently closed for refurbishment), an established tropical garden with some spectacular palms, and the park’s most recent significant addition, the ‘Peace Pagoda‘ which was constructed by a group of Japanese Buddhists in 1985. You can read the full story of this ornate but rather incongruous monument on the Battersea Park website, which I’ve linked to above.

I have to say that its a lovely place to visit – it gives the parks that are local to me in the East End a very good run for their money. If you decide to go along and see it for yourself, the closest station is Battersea Park, which can be reached from Victoria, or if you fancy a walk you can get off the Circle Lane at Sloane Square and walk south and across Chelsea Bridge to get there.