Some of London's finest parks aren't easy to reach, or find, or even notice. Such is the case with Bedfords Park in the borough of Havering - just past Chase Cross, a couple of miles north of Romford and nearly in Essex. It's nowhere near a station, no buses pass the main entrance and the bus that follows the southern edge doesn't stop for a mile because nobody lives here. It's very much a park for those with a car or for very local people, although I suspect most of those drive too. I caught the 499 from Romford and hopped off at the stop before the hiatus, nipped through the hedge and yomped up the hill. I wasn't disappointed.
Bedfords was a medieval estate that took its name from John Bedford, a 14th century landowner. The manor passed through many hands, gaining a two storey brick mansion and a two acre walled garden in the 18th century, one of which survives. The widow of the last Lord of the Manor sold the estate to Romford Urban District Council in 1933 who opened it as a park the following year. That's the short version anyway, you can read a much longer version on the Havering website, assuming you think to scroll down the page and open the right tab. Swotting up on Bedfords Park's history is not obligatory before a visit.
The park is a combination of meadow, fields, wetland, pasture, woodland and grassy slope, which is pretty damned good for a municipal site. A path might lead you down a broad sweep of greensward or round a reed-edged lake or across a carpet of crunchy acorns or into a field grazed by cattle or deep into dense trees or into a wildflower meadow or up a hillock with views towards Kent or alternatively into the car park. When you have 215 acres to play with your environment can afford to be very mixed. On my visit the dogs were mostly round the lake, the families were mostly round the adventure playground and the pensioners were mostly near the cafe, but this may not always be the case.
The Visitor Centre is perched not at the highest point but at the spot with the best views, i.e. exactly where the mansion used to be. This means you can take your coffee and cake out onto the terrace and spot both the City and the QE2 Bridge, or if the weather's less good sit inside the Observation Room and enjoy a distant blur of Dagenham. The facility's run by the Essex Wildlife Trust so the shop sells a number of animal-type gifts, plus there's a small art gallery in the curved corridor on the way to the toilets. I was surprised by how good the facilities were for the middle of nowhere much, but hurrah for that.
Even better there's a deer park. A large patch has been securely fenced off for the exclusive use of a herd of captive red deer, and if you're lucky one might wander up close or instead they might just all lurk in the shade of a distant tree. Even better there's a walled garden, the same one I mentioned three paragraphs back, which is lovingly tending by a group of gardening-focused volunteers. Unfortunately it's only open (with fresh produce on sale) on a Tuesday and a Thursday, and on any other day the 'walled' part of the Walled Garden renders the interior invisible. It was additionally open yesterday for Apple Day festivities, but I unintentionally turned up a day early and missed all the fun.
Havering has some excellentparks, which perhaps isn't surprising in a borough more that's more than 50% parkland. But because it's out on a limb, and because the parks are generally in the less accessible areas, a lot of the green treasures go unenjoyed. I'm glad I made the effort to see what Bedfords Park had to offer, indeed I wonder if it's the largest London park I'd never been to before...
