City park

Tree posture: A jogger stretches under one of the park's yew trees.

My local park is a stone’s throw from my flat. It’s small, you could walk the perimeter in ten minutes and, in addition to parkland, it contains a couple of basketball and/or football pitches, a kindergarten and a children’s playground. The peaceful appearance in the photographs is deceptive since it is bordered on three sides by busy roads, most notably the South Circular with its continuous stream of heavy traffic and pollution.

For all that, it is a little oasis and is well used: for picnics, by frisbee-throwers, for ad hoc cricket matches, children’s games, jogging, dog walking and cycling. The local pentecostal church holds fêtes there a couple of times a year, and at one time there were fireworks parties on Guy Fawkes Day. The London Air Ambulance has even been known to commandeer it as an emergency landing pad.

I cut through the park most days en route to the underground station and over time I’ve got to know some of the regulars by sight. The grey-haired Asian jogger in his track suit and baseball cap who seems to turn out daily in all weathers; the two elderly ladies, one black, one white – obviously friends - walking a miniature poodle. Most of the handful of people that I recognise are getting on in years; the younger ones seem transient, more interchangeable, less visible somehow.



On weekend afternoons during spells of warm weather, the benches are filled by escapees from flats with no garden, reading books and newspapers in a variety of languages and surrounded by cans of beer and soft drinks: a mixture of couples, teenagers, and families with children in push chairs .....

The most vociferous group, unsurprisingly, are the teenagers.

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The sports pitches are packed at weekends too, generally for soccer matches – played with a feverish and noisy intensity - or knockabout, spontaneous games between local boys and, in more recent years, girls (thanks in part perhaps to Bend it Like Beckham?).

During the week you are more likely to find just the occasional loner attempting to land a shot in the basketball hoops ... for hours on end. Shoot. Miss. Shoot again. Success. Bounce the ball. Shoot again. Miss.

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It is only now that I know I will be leaving this area soon that I realise how much I appreciate this patch of green. When I cross it on my way home from work I start to unwind. It has become a physical demarcation line between my private and public lives.

And the elderly ladies and I have started to nod to each other when we meet. Pretty good for London.