London would be inconceivable, indeed unliveable, without its parks. There must be over a thousand public parks, open spaces, wildlife centres and recreation grounds in the capital. About 47% of the city is termed as green space, excluding private gardens.

Of course, visitors to London concentrate on the eight royal parks: Hyde park, Kensington gardens, Richmond park, Bushy park, St James park, the Green park, Regent’s park and Greenwich park but there so many other parks worth visiting and each one has its own special feature.

The borough of Brent, for example, contains eighty nine parks and open spaces of which three: Fryent, Roundwood and Gladstone are historically listed and have received national awards.

The park we took our Sunday afternoon walk yesterday was not listed and is not remarkable for any special feature. That, however, did not exclude the pleasant walk we had in it, even with a freshening wind.

The park’s history is of interest. The idea of holding a great exhibition in Wembley park had already been mooted in 1902 but this involved the loss of the pleasure gardens created by railway entrepreneur Sir Edward Watkin in the 1890’s. In compensation land was bought by the council for a replacement park, opened in 1914 and called King Edward VII park in memory of the king who had died in 1910.

The park is bigger than it looks and has a good variety of trees including a ginkgo biloba or maidenhair tree, the oldest living species of tree (there are others at Bagni di Lucca’s Villa Ada and at Lucca’s botannical gardens, for instance.) There are play and keep fit areas, a disused bowling hut (which almost became London’s only Welsh school (now relocated at Feltham), fine views across to Harrow-on-the-Hill, an elegant entrance stairway and the usual scurry of grey squirrels.

It’s a pity there isn’t a memorial in the park to a king who was Elgar’s good friend. Elgar, however, did dedicate his second symphony to the king’s memory and, coincidentally, composed one of the very few works he wrote after his wife’s death, the ‘Empire March’, specially for Wembley’s Empire exhibition, finally held in 1924.

There are also, among others, Edward VII memorial parks in Lisbon, to commemorate the king’s visit there in 1902 and even one in Brisbane.