Park of the week

39. Swan Lane Open Space

This park is a little haven, by the busy A1000 in Whetstone. I’ve been there twice. The first time was in about 1988, when my elder daughter was aged about three and we were new to the area. The second was at the start of the pandemic, just before the first lockdown. It was also the start of our lockdown park visits. Jack’s college had had to close without warning, and my overriding memory is of bewilderment, of wondering what was going to happen and for how long it would go on. I still have no answers. 

The park is a section of the old Finchley Common. It was created in the nineteen-thirties on the site of former gravel pits, beside a nineteenth-century estate. It’s the smallest of Barnet’s premier parks. It has a children's playground, including an artificial rock created to look like a sandstone boulder containing an ammonite. There’s also a café (with a toilet), and a pond covered with reeds and water plants, fed by a natural spring. It’s thought that the spring was used as a place of baptism by Cedd, 2nd Bishop of London, in the seventh century. Much of the park is mown grass, with paths for walking and benches, and large trees, but it also has more natural areas managed for nature conservation with long grass and smaller trees.

There’s a group of giant redwoods and a Cedar of Lebanon inside a wooded area planted with conifers at the entrance on High Road, Whetstone. Rose beds by the café have been planted in memory of two local residents and there is also a memorial to a local lollipop man.

Those of us over a certain age and level of nerdiness may be interested to note that, in the early 1970s, a scene from the Monty Python ‘Hell’s Grannies’ sketch (itself shot nearly entirely in North Finchley) was filmed in the park.
There is access to the park from Swan Lane, Whetstone High Road and Woodside Lane. There’s no car park but there are spaces on the surrounding streets.

Judith Field

Swan Lane Open Space, Swan Lane, London N20 0PR