The Unexpected Beauty of Croydon

There are three meadows in the Woodside, South Norwood and Selhurst area, approximately north east of Croydon town centre. Two of them only became public parks in the 1990s, meaning they don't appear in the book Croydon's Parks: An Illustrated History , which was published in 1988.  Brickfields Meadow  Brickfields Meadow lake, Jan 2021 The peace and stillness of the grassy meadow, small woodland and deep lake at Brickfields are quite a contrast to the site's industrial past. As the name suggests, it was previously a brickworks. The first brickworks on the site started in 1810, where Thomas Becket School now stands, but closed in 1856. Horris Parks opened a brickworks on what is now the meadow in the 1880s and it was later bought by Edward Handley, becoming Handleys Brickworks. The brickworks eventually closed in 1974. Housing was built on part of the site while the rest was opened as public green space.  Adult & juvenile moorhens, Brickfields, Oct 2020 Interestingly, ...

I've been slipping, sliding and squelching my way through Croydon's green spaces recently. Every time I come home, I bring souvenirs with me, in the form of mud. My trouser legs look like Jackson Pollock has had a go at them with some brown paint.  This time of year, there's water everywhere and many of our parks are flooded. I've seen people concerned about this, particularly as parks are especially important at the moment. However, their tendency to flood is a key reason why some of these sites remain public land.  Ashburton Park, Jan 2021 Croydon's green spaces used to have more ponds and lakes than they currently do.  The current "flooding" in Ashburton Park pretty much exactly matches the location of the lake on this map from 1898 ( available on the National Library of Scotland website here ).  Wandle Park was the site of Croydon's first sewage treatment works, however this was short-lived, being replaced by an abbatoir. Despite this insalubrious ...