Park of the week

69. Watling Park

This space, in Burnt Oak, is one of Barnet’s Premier Parks. It takes its name from the nearby A5, which was as an ancient trackway known as Watling Street. The A5 formed one of our pre-M1 London to Liverpool routes and my main memory of it is that there were very few places along it to stop and eat. I was in the first car on the northbound M1 – yes, really - would anyone like me to write about that?

Anyway, Watling Park is an open, hilly area, mainly mown grassland with a rose garden, and more natural areas of undergrowth at the edges and along the Burnt Oak Brook, a tributary of the Silk Stream, which runs through the park. It’s within the Watling Estate, a large council housing estate built in the 1920s. The park, opened in 1931, is one of a number of open spaces created throughout the estate, following the course of the Silk Stream (see Silkstream Park, no. 34) and the Burnt Oak Brook. The area was formerly farmland and the oak trees on the hill are reminders of its rural past. It’s a site of Local Importance for Nature Conservation.

We’ve also visited some of the other nearby open spaces on the estate: The Meads, an unlandscaped, natural area and Lyndhurst Park, a small open grassland area dominated by old hedgerow trees in the middle .

The Thames21 volunteer group, who working with communities to improve rivers and canals, regularly do conservation work in Watling Park on the Brook, for example cleaning it up and getting rid of Himalayan Balsam (an invasive non-native species – see no. 21).

Watling Park has a children’s playground and an outdoor gym, but no café or toilets.

The main entrance is at the corner of Watling Avenue and Orange Hill Road, and there is also access from Fortescue Road, Cressingham Road, Abbots Road and Colchester Road. There is no car park, but we managed to find a space on one of the nearby streets.

Judith Field

Watling Park, Cressingham Road, Edgware, HA8 0RW