This small side street park in Southwark is an interesting park that was recently refurbished into its current rather bubbly appearance.
In part the result of post-war clearance as the park used to sit on a corner junction of two roads, but the houses on the corner were hit by bombs. During the rebuilding works, one road vanished, leaving this park on the side of Hatfields. The vanished road was by the time it was removed the lesser of the two, but it was by far the older, originally called Angel Street and later The Broadwall and dating back to when the whole area was still fields.
Where the football pitches are today used to be a Printing Works and some houses, and the whole area was turned into the park in the 1860s.
The name, Hatfields dates from the time when the area was used for drying animal skins to be made into, unsurprisingly, hats.
The current design of the park dates from a refurbishment in 2015, replacing a fairly bland flat triangle of land with the current cluster of mounds that add so much more character to the space.
It’s hard for a park to look good in the bleak winter, but the mounds of soil give the area character and the raised ridge running along the roadside helps to create an artificial barrier where there was nothing before.
