London’s Pocket Parks: Garfield Road Park, TW1

This is a small pocket park in Twickenham town centre on a plot that was once a row of houses, later cleared to make space for a car park and a superstore.

Garfield Road emerged as a street filling up some fields behind the main street. It was mainly lined with small terraced housing and completed by the 1930s. Otherwise, it was unremarkable.

However, in the 1950s, a large swathe of housing on the eastern side of the road was cleared to make space for that most 1950s of neccessities — the modern motor car. In the late 1960s, a new building swept away the old houses on the northern end, replacing them with the office block and multistory car park that’s there today.

In 1978, some more of the houses on Garfield Road were demolished to make more space for a temporary car park while the old car park was built on, leaving a corner of Garfield Road a bit of a wasteland. That was to become the pocket park, which was created in the early 1980s when a new reverse turning head was created for motorists using Garfield Road.

In 2013, a plan was made to revamp the park, with a large central “roundabout” replacing the crossroads, but that plan never came to pass.

As a park, it’s fairly plain. On my visit in the summer, it seemed to be mainly used as a path to walk through rather than a park to sit in.

However, that may have been an aberration, as I was there in the early morning, and it’s apparently much busier as a place to sit in the afternoons. Which probably explains all the pigeons I saw — busy hoovering up the crumbs and scraps from yesterday’s diners.

A nice touch are the park benches, which in places look fairly standard, but some are designed to look somewhat like old books — as we are close to Twickenham Library.

The library benches were added in May 2022 by the library and in addition to their design, they also include quotes from local notable authors.

• “No entertainment is so cheap as reading, nor any pleasure so lasting” – Lady Mary Wortley Montagu
• “Let knowledge grow from more to more” – Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• “Were I as rich in worldly commodity, as in hearty will… I would give thee Books.” – Ignatius Sancho
• “Among her branches, in and out, The city breezes play” – Amy Levy
• “In the winter she curls up around a good book and dreams away the cold.” – Ben Aaronovitch
• “Words are capable of flying.” – Jess Kidd