London’s Pocket Parks: Goldington Crescent Gardens, NW1

This is a small curved garden a few minutes walk north of St Pancras station that was once a private space for the houses that formed the Crescent.

The main road the park sits next to was laid out in the early 1800s as London started to expand northwards. The housing followed when Goldington Crescent was built as part of a development by the Duke of Bedford, a perfectly oval garden was created in front of the houses with a simple lawn and a path running around the sides.

(there’s a hint that the garden might have preceded the housing, but it’s uncertain)

There was also a urinal at the north end for the public to use and a large water trough provided by the Metropolitan Drinking Fountain and Cattle Trough Association for horses to use.

The garden was lost as a park because in 1889, the Duke of Bedford offered to donate the gardens to a Polytechnic college to be built there. The Duke was also open to giving the land to the Polytechnic for them to sell and use the money to buy a larger site elsewhere. However, the London County Council intervened and bought the garden using funding from the Midland Railway, for the garden to be maintained as an open space.

After the garden was opened to the public, it was redesigned somewhat, with a simple single path running through the middle, reflecting the reality that people were likely to walk through the middle anyway. It still has a single main path, but interestingly, at some point, the southern end flipped sides to face onto the main Pancras Road instead of the smaller Goldington Street.

The park gained some art in 2010, which today looks like, well, umm, giant animal turds, but are, or at least were, once supposed to be fluffy white clouds. They weren’t popular when first installed, and I can’t say they’ve aged particularly well either. The one upside of the art is that it’s added texture to the park, which had been a flat lawn but now has some piled-up mounds.

Something else worth looking for though is next to the southern entrance, a small black box. It’s an early electricity junction box for the St. Pancras Power Stations, which were the first power stations to be built by a local authority for public disribition — as opposed to the private power companies used elsewhere.

These were often nicknamed Lucy Boxes because most of the early types were made by the Lucy Foundry in Oxford – and here, it’s likely to have been associated with the tram network that ran right past the pocket park.