Park of the week

175. Streatley Road Pocket Park

This pocket park is in Kilburn and was developed from a plain open space in 2009. It is landscaped with shrubs and trees, including a palm tree, and has a playground. There’s also a community garden and some decorative old-looking stones, about which I could find out nothing, I'm afraid. When we visited it was quiet, and it was good to be able to sit calmly and not to have to wait for the “big lying down swing.” It's so small that, on the map at the end, it doesn't even look like an open space.

I’ve written about pocket parks before and it’s worth clarifying what this term means. A pocket park is a small park accessible to the general public. Typically, a pocket park occupies one to three municipal lots and is smaller than 0.5 hectares (1 acre) in size. Many are smaller: the size of tennis court. They can be urban, suburban or rural, but they customarily appear in densely urbanized areas, where land is very expensive and space for the development of larger urban parks is limited. They are frequently created on small, irregular pieces of public or private land, such as in vacant building lots, in brownfield sites, beside railways, beneath utility lines, or in parking spots.

They can be both natural or more formal in character (or a blend of both) but they provide a green open space that also offers habitat opportunities and opportunities for people to connect with nature. The government Pocket Park funding scheme provided grants of £2m in England and more than 100 parks were created across 26 London boroughs. These ranged from community orchards to edible bus stops. You can’t actually eat the signs: they’re set up a group called The Edible Bus Stop who help communities create areas of nature around their bus stops, a sort of legal guerilla gardening (where people cultivate plants in public or private spaces without permission). 

Another group with similar aims is Energy Garden, who set up this garden on Platform 3 at Finchley Central Underground Station.

It’s a haven for wildlife which also helps feed the local community – the green covered box on the left at the back is for donated vegetables from the garden, for people to take. 

Judith Field

Streatley Road Pocket Park, 22 Streatley Road, London, NW6 7LR