Wanstead Park

Wanstead Park is not well-known outside East London, yet Dr Simon Thurley has described it as “One of the most significant parks in England”.  The Wanstead Park historic landscape, as defined by Historic England, covers approximately 400 acres, and is Grade II* listed. Ownership of the park is divided between four landowners, the largest being the City of London with some three quarters of the total area.

The park has three distinct aspects -

Wanstead House, Richard Westall (1765-1836). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

• It has important surviving features of a nationally significant landscaped garden and its “out park”, laid out between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.

• The public areas are an important local amenity: with an estimated 200,000 visits per year.

• The park is also an important refuge for wildlife, particularly waterfowl.

Wanstead Park was enclosed shortly after 1500, while under Royal ownership. It was used by Henry VII and his successor as a "maison de retraite" and base for hunting. After a period in which it seems to have fallen out of favour, Wanstead passed to Lord Rich of Leez in the 1550s and thereafter became a favoured country seat for a succession of prominent owners.

The focus of the Tudor and later estate was Wanstead House, the second incarnation of which was the "princely mansion" built 1715-22 for Sir Richard Child, Bt., later Viscount Castlemaine and (from 1734) Earl Tylney of Castlemaine. Designed by Colen Campbell with some input from William Kent, this important precursor of the Palladian revival was to be demolished only a century later, in the 1820s. The first Earl and his successor commissioned at least three major phases of landscaping, successively reflecting the baroque, artinatural and English Landscape styles then fashionable. The gardens of Wanstead were influential in design terms and widely admired.

Though the house is gone, some secondary structures do survive. The public park still contains two separately listed buildings, both dating from around 1760 (The Temple and a ruined boat-house grotto). Thomas Hardwick’s St Mary’s Church (1790), which was associated with the Wanstead estate, is the only Grade I listed building in Redbridge. The former stables of Wanstead House (now occupied by Wanstead Golf Club), are Grade II listed, as are a pair of eighteenth-century gate piers in Overton Drive, which are maintained by the London Borough of Redbridge.

Turning to the landscape, the most visible legacy from Wanstead Park's past is a cascade of artificial lakes. However, though blurred by the passage of time and lack of maintenance, other aspects of the historic layout remain recognisable. For example, despite the devastation of the wooded areas in the 1820s and 1830s, when thousands of trees were felled for their value as timber, the footprint of the present day woodland in core areas of the park is similar to that in the late Georgian period. A number of ornamental earthworks also survive, though overgrown and in poor condition.

Wanstead Park has an active team of volunteers, and plans are currently being finalised to restore Wanstead Park, which has been on the Historic England ‘At Risk’ register since 2009.

text with thanks to Richard Arnopp at The Friends of Wanstead Parklands