MOUNTSFIELD PARK: One of London's Many Green Spaces, Guest Post by Gretchen Woelfle

Autumn colors, London style. Mountsfield Park, Hither Green (South London)

My friend and fellow children's book writer Gretchen Woelfle loves to travel and frequently goes to London, living in local neighborhoods. Here is a post about one of her recent visits.

London has some magnificent famous parks: Regents Park, Hyde Park, Hampstead Heath among others. But I especially love London neighborhood parks. Many of them are the sites of homes (long gone) of landowning squires, or transformed farmers’ fields. A few include land reclaimed from World War II bombsites. 

Dragonfly gates at entrance to Mountsfield Park

I spent a month in Hither Green (south London) right across from Mountsfield Park, not famous but lovely just the same.  

A path with light and shade under green, leafy arches

I took a daily stroll (along with locals and their dogs) across large expanses of guilt-free (for a SoCal resident) lawns where people of all genders and ages play soccer, under tall stately trees, across wild places where the grass isn't mown and shrubbery isn't trimmed, with winding paths through it all. 

Girl power!

Lots of coffee at the tea shop.

I lingered at a tea shop, a rose garden, a wildflower meadow, a community vegetable garden, tennis courts, and a playground.

Hidden sculpture tucked in the trees.

There are carved wooden sculptures hidden here and there and heaps of logs placed to provide habitat for an endangered English beetle.

Berries ripe for autumn harvest.

The autumn colors were out – subtle but stunning. I love the wild foxes that roam the parks and gardens all over London.  Residents call them vermin, but they are exotic to me, with their long bushy tails. I see them crossing the street into the park at dusk.  And one morning as I was retrieving my bike from the back garden shed, I startled one out of the next-door overgrown garden.

Community garden.

Google tells me that 47% of London is “green”. The website below lists 111 parks and Mountsfield isn’t even one of them. Wherever you happen to land in London, there’s probably a park – or a garden or a common or a heath – nearby where you can enjoy the pleasures of the English countryside in the heart of the city.

https://secretldn.com/london-parks-gardens-list/: Here’s the list of 111 parks

https://www.timeout.com/london/things-to-do/londons-hidden-gardens-and-green-spaces Small gardens and pocket parks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountsfield_Park tells the history of Mountsfield park.

Scarlet highlights.