Barclay Park is a

park A park is an area of natural, semi-natural or planted space set aside for human enjoyment and recreation or for the protection of wildlife or natural habitats. Urban parks are urban green space, green spaces set aside for recreation inside t ...

in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, England.

History

In 1403 there was a house on the land called High Wyches which by 1677 had been renamed to High Grounds. In 1871 the house and estate was bought by Robert Buchanan Barclay and it was renamed to High Leigh. In 1935 the Barclay family gifted part of the grounds of the house to the public for the silver jubilee celebrations of

King George V George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert; 3 June 1865 – 20 January 1936) was King of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions, and Emperor of India, from 6 May 1910 until his death in 1936. Born during the reign of his grandmother Que ...

. The park includes a lake and bridge which was laid out in the 1870s by

James Pulham and Son James Pulham and Son was a firm of Victorian landscape gardeners and terracotta manufacturers which exhibited and won medals at London's Great Exhibition of 1851 and 1862 International Exhibition. History James Pulham and Son was founded by J ...

an international firm of landscape designers in this era. The park was officially opened on 12 May 1937. After Robert Barclay's death in 1921 the property passed to his son, Robert Leatham Barclay, and he sold the house and forty acres to a company of which he was a director, First Conference Estate Ltd, which provided conference facilities for churches and Christian groups and also ran The Hayes conference centre in Derbyshire. That company morphed into a charity (The Christian Conference Trust) in 1996 and continues to provide meeting facilities for a wide range of users, including churches, other charities, local businesses and public bodies from around the country. High Leigh Conference Centre celebrates its centenary in 2022.

Facilities

The facilities include an ornamental lake, walking routes, a children's play area, a woodland, Spital

brook A brook is a small river or natural stream of fresh water. It may also refer to: Computing *Brook, a programming language for GPU programming based on C *Brook+, an explicit data-parallel C compiler *BrookGPU, a framework for GPGPU programming ...

, a meadow, picnicking, and two Pulham Bridges over the brook. Barclay Parkrun takes place every Saturday morning. The park was given a

Green Flag Award The Green Flag Award is an international accreditation given to publicly accessible parks and open spaces, managed under licence from the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, a UK Government department, by Keep Britain Tidy, ...

and has an area of 18 acres.

References

{{Authority control Parks and open spaces in Hertfordshire