We are experiencing a succession of spectacularly sunny days in London. What better time than to head for a park! Which one will it be this time? Let’s go for King Edward VII Park, hardly two miles away. Of course, we’d visited it before and there’s my post on it at:
Parks, however, change with the seasons and there’s always something new to catch and enchant the eye.
King Edward VII Park’s history is of some 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 Watkins 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.
But who was Sir Edward Watkins and what were his pleasure gardens like?
Sir Edward was a railway magnate and had plans to build London’s own Eiffel Tower, making it even taller than Paris’ famous icon. He bought 280 acres of land in Wembley as part of his grand scheme to build a new community. This was to be connected to central London by the Metropolitan railway (now part of London’s underground) of which he was chairman.
The new community was meant to attract inhabitants from the over-crowded disease-infested streets of inner London and provide them instead with sanitary houses and lots of fresh air. The tower and its surrounding pleasure gardens was meant to be the carrot to attract people to his idyllic vision. In this respect Watkins was a pioneer of the garden city movement and precursor of the extensive suburban metroland of the nineteen hundreds.
Watkins’ park, which boasted a boating lake, waterfall and sports grounds, was opened in 1894 and soon became very popular. Many thousands of people visited it in its first few months. However, construction of the answer to the Eiffel tower went badly and was halted when the first platform had been built. Moreover, the tower was too far from central London to be a real success. Attractions like the London Eye, for example, would not be quite so popular if they were stuck in Wembley!
With personal money thrown into the scheme and with the absence of visitors Sir Edward Watkins had to throw in the towel and ‘Watkins’s folly’, as it came to be known, or what was completed of it, was eventually demolished in 1906.
It is a pity that this attraction was never inaugurated. However, to compensate, the building of Wembley stadium for the Empire exhibition in 1923 assured that Wembley would be firmly placed on the map. Moreover, if one laments the possible views one might have had from the completed Watkins tower then one can more than make up with them by the wonderful panorama of London to be obtained from nearby Harrow-on-the-Hill and Horsenden Hill.
Nothing now remain of Watkin’s tower. Even the nearby pub named ‘Watkin’s Folly’ has changed its name.
King Edward VII 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 botanical 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.
Unfortunately the play and sports areas are closed for the duration. However, we noticed that the tennis courts had been illegally appropriated by some people as shown below (how did they get in?).
We found this more unfair than illegal especially as children had now been excluded from their playground.
The park was moderately full of people. After all, can one entirely blame them on a sunny bank holiday week-end so long into lock-down? Some of the visitors were jogging, others were flying kites and there was even a two-some practicing boxing.
Nowhere has the British lock-down been anywhere as strict as that of many other countries, especially Italy where the population is being kept under strict observation with checks by the police and the army. Only now is it being slightly eased. Most areas of London are, frankly, unpoliceable for infractions to lock-down. In spite of many members of the public informing the authorities, for example, of large groups of people not observing social distancing there just would not be the police resources available(although many thousands of fines have already been issued).
Moreover, there is a cultural reason why Italians have observed government dictates so much more closely than in the UK: it’s their much greater fear of catching something than the brits, who are quite happy to wander about even in winter in shorts. Indeed, Italians have been described as hypochondriac. In Italy talking about one’s complaints of the liver is as common as chatting about the weather in the UK, not to mention illnesses involving ‘la cervical’ (cervical spondylitis) and the ubiquitous ‘colpo d’aria’ (sudden blast of air causing a chill).
Of course, all this means that an ineffectual government will prolong the UK’s exit from the crisis much later than any other European nation. In Italy, the government protects its citizens with a single, strong message (which only now is being slightly eased) whereas in the UK, with all the government mixed messages flying around we have to protect ourselves!