Park of the week

130. Wray Crescent Open Space

This is a small green space in Islington, containing the only cricket pitch in the borough. It holds the Green Flag award, which it was first awarded in 2018. It has also received Islington in Bloom awards. It’s a relatively small space; plans to double its size were rejected by local residents in the nineteen eighties. As far as I can tell, there used to be housing on the site, which was bought by the local authority during the nineteen seventies. The buildings were demolished to make space for a park. 

The park also has a tarmac court with basketball hoops and football goals. There are a playground, outdoor table tennis table and picnic tables. A source of the underground Hackney Brook runs under the park. it also includes a community garden named in honour of local resident Yvonne Conolly, the first Black female headteacher in the UK. 

The Friends of Wray Crescent Open Space, started in 2018, are a group of local volunteers who work together to improve the park. In 2021 they set up a tree nursery, to address locally the shortage of native trees in the UK. The Friends sourced one hundred trees including hazel, crab apple, rowan, dog rose and blackthorn. The trees were cared for three years and, starting in November 2023, they have been distributed within the park and to groups and businesses in Islington. The next step will be to plant more saplings this spring, to continue the project. Also, local residents have donated a small number of home-grown oak trees to the park. The Friends also rebuild the wood chip path in the park every year.

There are toilets, but no café. We parked on a nearby street.

Judith Field

Wray Crescent Open Space, Wray Crescent, London, N4 3BH