This corner pocket park in Haggerston has a plural name, because it’s actually two parks if you look closely.
It sits on the corner of streets that were laid out in a housing development by Richard Benyon de Beauvoir in the 1840s, with rows of well-to-do housing. The park was itself the site of a couple of houses, but then WWII came along, and on 1st November 1940, a direct hit on the corner badly damaged the houses in the area.
Post-war rebuilding to the south of the park in the mid-1960s saw the remaining houses replaced with tower blocks, and for many years, the area where the park is today was used for temporary housing – likely portacabins.
Later, this was cleared away as well, and the space was laid out as a pocket park.
The other side of the road was also cleared, and while it’s not immediately obvious as it’s a tarmac’d games area, it’s the second of the two gardens that make up Ufton Gardens. It’s not very garden like though.
Up to a few years ago, the main park was a fairly bland space, mainly some benches around a wide path, some lawn and trees and not much else.
Today, it’s structurally the same, but there’s a lot more planting around the edges and the benches are painted with rainbows, giving the pocket park a new nickname of the Rainbow Park.
It changed thanks to the pandemic, when locals with not much else to do started gardening the somewhat neglected space, and now there’s a regular meet-up of locals to tend the space each month.
Considering recent fights over low traffic neighbourhoods, it was the De Beauvoir Association that both campaigned to stop more houses being replaced with tower blocks in the 1960s, but also to introduce low-traffic networks. Side roads were closed off or entrances narrowed, as a temporary measure, and made permanent in the 1970s.
And in 2023, the road between the two parks was slightly reduced to make space for Sustainable drainage systems (SuDS) and cycle racks.
In a way, you could say there are now three gardens on Ufton Road, and an extension of the 1960s Low Traffic Network.
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