Park of the week

119. Lowlands Recreation Ground and The Grove Open Space

One recent Sunday, I’d planned to visit another park in Islington but couldn’t face yet another stop-start drive along the Archway and Holloway Roads.  Instead, I decided to head towards Harrow. This involved the Jack-forbidden turning right at the end of the road. He shouted at me all the way there and called me several names, not all of which were words he’d made up.

Harrow has a lot of open spaces, so it’s good to withstand all that and visit them. Lowlands Recreation Ground and The Grove Open Space are opposite each other, on either side of Lowlands Road, near Harrow College.

Lowlands Recreation Ground is a small park, next to Harrow on the Hill Underground Station. It includes a multi-use building said to contain a café (the building wasn’t open when we visited on a Sunday) and a large multi-purpose space functioning as a nursery, meeting hall, yoga studio and a theatre. The building has large barn doors that open out onto an external stage area, with amphitheatre-like terraces of seating in the park for the staging of concerts and plays. The park has also been designed to be used for the occasional market and Christmas fair. There are also two play areas, table tennis tables and an outdoor gym. There’s lots of green space, and benches.

The Grove Open Space is a steep grassy slope on the north side of Harrow Hill. There is evidence of early medieval, or possibly earlier, agricultural use on the Hill. The land here was once part of the estate of Harrow Manor, recorded in the Domesday Book in 1086 when the Archbishop of Canterbury owned it. Today, the space is crossed by tarmac paths, with trees around the edges, and good views over Harrow from the top. A steel sculpture of a leaf has been put up in the north-west corner, symbolising the greenness of Harrow.

We parked in the station car park, for which we had to pay. There didn’t seem to be many spaces elsewhere, but that might have been because I don’t know the area and once we’d found the park, I had missed an available spaces that there might have been further back.

In the evening Jack apologised to me, unprompted.

Judith Field

Lowlands Recreation Ground, 73 Lowlands Rd, Harrow HA1 3AW