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schoolgirl athletics meetings in the 70s were long
gone when I moved here. In one corner a park bench
plaque remembers Rose & Dick Darch. I must have
read this inscription many thousands of times during
the consecutive lifetimes of two dogs before I learned
that Rose was Auntie Glad’s (my dad’s sister) best
friend when the two women worked together at the
Bermondsey Peak Frean biscuit factory after the war.
That’s Deptford Park in the aerial photograph below,
my little patch of green encircled by trees. One mile
east of Tower Bridge the Thames curves around the
Rotherhithe Peninsula as it begins it’s great loop
around the Isle of Dogs. Below and to the left of the
river the rectangle of water is Greenland Dock in the
old Surrey Docks where Arctic whalers once berthed.
The bare patch of land on the riverside is Convoys
Wharf where Rupert Murdoch used to ship in paper
for his Fleet Street and Wapping printing presses.
The first parks were the royal and aristocratic deer
parks designed to keep the game in and the riff raff
out. Over time they developed into the parks around
stately homes where the once natural landscape was
now landscaped to look natural! As the population
grew so the people spilled into these once guarded
and private domains until finally the pressures of the
industrial revolution led to the creation of public
parks as pressure valves for crowded cities
.
free-range children roaming wild and free. My sister
and I walked to school from the age of five and as I
always say, apart from being run over by the Evening
Standard van, nothing bad ever happened to me.
The stepping-stones of our childhood explorations
were the parks and we travelled by foot, by pushbike
and by Red Bus Rover. Rockcliffe Gardens in
Plumstead, opened by a lady mayor of Woolwich in
the 1930s on the site of an old brickworks, had ponds,
a waterfall, sticklebacks and newts. Danson Park in
Welling, an old private estate, had derelict stables and
an Art Deco Lido with drowned bees and a big
splashy fountain in which pre-‘elf & safety children
could sit to our hearts content. Greenwich Park had
the boating lake, reckless hill tumbling from the Old
Observatory and the museums - all free and not at all
fazed by free-range children. The 53 bus from
Plumstead Common took us to St James’s Park for
the pelicans and the Queen and on to Hyde Park for
the whole world - or so it seemed aged ten.
Today I live in a house that backs on to Deptford Park.
Once part of John Evelyn’s estate it was opened as a
public park by Baroness Burdett-Coutts as a gift of
Victorian philanthropy having spent a hundred years
as part of Deptford’s market gardens famed for their
asparagus. Yes really! The old cinder running track
and the sand pits for field events where I competed in