Join me on a journey of data-driven disappointment as I attempt to answer a question nobody else is asking.
What are the five smallest parks in Barking & Dagenham?
There are all sorts of fundamental questions here, not least "what is a park anyway?", but thankfully Barking & Dagenham council have provided a precise number and a helpful map.
"We're so proud Barking and Dagenham has 28 brilliant parks and open spaces which are much loved by so many people. Our ambition has always been to provide a range of accessible, good quality facilities for residents of all ages and abilities to enjoy." [Councillor Saima Ashraf, Deputy Leader of the Council]
But which of these 28 are the smallest? What we need is official data, and thankfully the council have provided this in their Parks and Open Spaces Tree Planting Strategy. This 51 page document lists the area (in hectares) of 28 parks and open spaces to two decimal places, in a table which appeared to answer all my questions. So I went out and visited the five smallest in the hope of bringing you cutting-edge reportage everyone would enjoy. Let's see how I did.
This one's close to the old Dagenham car works, not far from Asda, and lurks behind a ring of 1930s council housing off the main road. It has heraldic gates because it's one of 471 King George V Fields opened across Britain to commemorate the monarch by providing recreational opportunity. This one's been much altered and effectively segregated by age, with the addition of a fenced-off playground on one side of the main path and a separate area for adolescents on the other. Youngsters get an incredibly sparse selection of equipment including two swings and a rockable pig, while the older lot get a skateramp, a basketball court, a climbable thing and a cluster of unvandalisable benches. The only space for ball games is a separate rectangle of lawn where I disturbed a stereotypical youth in grey joggers wafting weed, who promptly wandered away. A bit bleak, even when it isn't December.
Before Dagenham was a massive estate with a car plant it was a quiet rural village, and here we are at the medieval church by the medieval Cross Keys inn. As B&D goes it's extremely incongruous. The churchyard was once known as God's Little Acre and is still signed as such, although following a Victorian extension it's now two acres in extent. Feel free to wander amid the graves reading epitaphs to beloved Mary, devoted Reginald, sleeping Lily and dear Patricia Doris. The only 21st century burials seem to be from family members sharing someone else's plot. The most evocative memorial is the pillar dedicated to 20 year-old PC George Clark, "barbarously murdered in a field" overnight in June 1840, whose pillar tells us His Uniform Good Conduct Gained Him The Respect Of All Who Knew Him And His Melancholy End Was Universally Deplored.
But by the back gate I found an information board naming this churchyard as a Local Nature Reserve, not a Park, so I started to query its presence in this list. Indeed when I got home I studied B&D's graphic more closely and it turns out this burial ground doesn't appear, the map includes only 26 parks not 28. As a result it seems I'd wasted my time coming here and researching the churchyard in person.
It also means King George's Field jumps up a place in my list which means we need a new fifth park to take its place. Thankfully I'd had the presence of mind to visit what I thought were the six smallest parks in Barking & Dagenham, just in case, which means I do have reportage for the actual number five.
This is somewhat underwhelming, a long rectangle of mostly grass laid out between contrasting flanks of lowly postwar flats. At one end is a single-storey community hall, offered at a peppercorn rent, beside a small playground that's mostly slides and swings. The council once used funds to provide some outdoor gym equipment and a rope slide collecting two landscaped humps, but that's about as good as Heath Park Open Space gets. All praise to B&D's Parks and Environment Maintenance Team for keeping the litter down, and seemingly dealing with the turd count too. At the adjacent shops I encountered several pensioners at the poorer end of the spectrum, shabbily anoraked, and the launderette was unsurprisingly doing good business. On the plus side I was amazed to see that the local takeaway offers cod and chips for just £6, about half of what's normally charged up west, but don't rush.
Before there was Barking Riverside there was the Thames View Estate, an isolated slice of housing added in the late 1950s between an industrial park and the railway. Newlands Park was its sole token greenspace, entirely insufficient in size by modern standards but since jazzed up to try to appeal to modern tastes. The playground has climbing frames and spiral slides Heath Park can only dream of and a choice of zoo animals to rock on. A skateramp, an all weather football pitch and an Adidas basketball court also have been provided. On the downside anyone attempting a perimeter jog gets to follow a red path with a chronically cracked surface, a sign by the back entrance laughably describes the place as a 'Pleasure Grounds', and the view to the west is all building site at present as the council replaces the original lowrise flats with denser brick-faced stock.
A short walk east of Barking town centre the railway tracks divide, and tucked inbetween (accessed via footbridge) is the tip of Essex Road. And where another terraced street bears off is a tiny triangular garden, one side along Suffolk Road, the other along Essex, provided for the benefit of a few hundred local residents. Initially I thought it was locked but the third gate turned out to be open, allowing access to a tarmac circle, a sinuous path and five trees. It felt a bit like someone had been to the playground store and fetched objects to sit and climb on, including a big log, a long curved bench, six stone spheres and some boulders. These apparently arrived in 2010 courtesy of Play England, along with one of those double-ended metal tubes you shout down, but not much else so I guess the local adolescents have their fun elsewhere.
Located almost at the very northern tip of the borough, I very nearly didn't find this one because it's not where the council website claims it is. When I did eventually spot it, through unbroken railings round the back of the cemetery, it then wasn't at all obvious how to get in. I deduced I needed to use an unlabelled gate further up Kingston Hill Avenue but this turned out to be locked, not by a council padlock but by a shiny chain of the kind a large dog might wear. Inside the rec I could see a man with a bull breed dog running up and down as if engrossed in training, and with no other way in I deduced the chain must be his. A sign on the gate advertised a website called Bully By Nature, whose limited range of goods includes a "combat collar" designed to "unleash your pet's inner warrior", and what I've concluded is that I'm bloody glad I never managed to get inside Kingston Hill Avenue Recreation Ground because it appears to be regularly frequented by my worst nightmare.
I was also now highly suspicious of my original data because Kingston Hill Recreation Ground was a lot bigger than Essex Road Gardens, maybe by a factor of 10, so couldn't possibly be Barking & Dagenham's smallest park. I've since measured both parks' area on a map and discovered that the measurement for Essex Road Gardens ought to have been 0.074 hectares, not 0.74, because whoever compiled the table muddled their decimal places.
Essex Road Gardens is thus is the smallest park in Barking & Dagenham by a considerable margin, and for completeness sake the list of five smallest parks in the borough ought to be as follows...
1st: Essex Road Gardens, Barking (0.07 hectares) 2nd: Kingston Hill Avenue Recreation Ground, Marks Gate (0.56 hectares) 3rd: Newlands Park, Thames View (0.79 hectares) 4th: King George's Field, Marsh Green (0.9 hectares) 5th: Heath Park Open Space, Becontree (1.23 hectares)
So ended my journey of data-driven disappointment.
