Park of the week

1. Coldfall Wood

I’m finding the pandemic tough to deal with, as I’m sure everyone is.  I find getting out of the house makes all the difference, particularly if I’m in an open space, and close to the natural world. I can forget work and what’s going on at home for a while, let my eyes focus on the distance and inhale the fresh north-west London air.

At the start of the first lockdown, my son Jack’s college closed without warning, he was left with nothing to do, and I had a 24-year-old autistic young man to fit into the at-home-all-day mix. Since mid-March, he and I have visited parks and open spaces once or twice a week. There were rumours at the start about parks having to close, but that didn’t happen, thank goodness. During the first lockdown all the playgrounds were locked. Jack likes outdoor gyms, and they were open. Now it’s the other way round, and the gyms are closed.

Jack wants us to go to a new place each time so, with our sometimes managing more than one in a day, we’ve visited eighty-seven as of the time of writing this. Some have been very crowded, which wouldn’t have registered with me before the pandemic. One or two have been disappointing, such as the park that no longer existed, having been devoured by Brent Cross Shopping Centre.  I’ve taken photos at each one, and many of them look remarkably similar. I think that this is the point, in a way: there are so many open spaces not that far away.

I’ll start with Coldfall Wood, Creighton Avenue, London N10 – between Muswell Hill and East Finchley. You can park on the road itself. It’s probably best to wear wellies because there aren’t any paved paths, for that reason it’s not the best place to go with a baby buggy. It’s an ancient woodland, the direct descendant of the original ‘wildwood’, which covered most of Britain until about five thousand years ago. There are bridges across a stream. We saw squirrels, jays, crows and we heard parakeets. Apparently, it’s also host to bats although we didn’t see any as we went during the daytime. We hardly saw anyone else, so it was good from the social distancing point of view, but someone had stuck a rainbow picture on a tree. It was fascinating to see what the area was like before the land was farmed, and later covered in houses. 

Judith Field

Coldfall Wood, Creighton Avenue, London N2 9BJ