Latchmere Recreation Ground or Latchmere Park is a public open space with a children's playground in Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth. It is located approximately south of the far larger

Battersea Park Battersea Park is a 200-acre (83-hectare) green space at Battersea in the London Borough of Wandsworth in London. It is situated on the south bank of the River Thames opposite Chelsea and was opened in 1858. The park occupies marshland recla ...

and the

River Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...

beyond. It is bounded by Burns Road to the south and Reform Street to the east and north. The former ''Latchmere School'' site, converted to housing in 1996, forms the eastern boundary. Latchmere Recreation Ground is a slightly humped, quadrilateral-shaped area mostly laid out to amenity grass with trees and intermittent shrub beds around the perimeter and specimen trees in the interior. The park is surrounded by low metal railing fencing. Pedestrian access is via gateways opposite St James' Grove mid-way on the northern side which leads via a wide footpath to another due south on Burns Road. This footpath is designated as a public highway. Another footpath with vehicle access has its entrance on Reform Street on the eastern side. This path intersects the other at a wide circular paved space then curves south to a second gateway further west on Burns Road. Children's playground areas lie centrally on either side of the pathways. The site is currently maintained and managed by Wandsworth Council in conjunction with ''Enable Leisure and Culture'' and their amenity and arboricultural maintenance contractors.

History

The area was originally

common land Common land is land owned by a person or collectively by a number of persons, over which other persons have certain common rights, such as to allow their livestock to graze upon it, to collect wood, or to cut turf for fuel. A person who has a ...

: ''Latchmoor Common'' or ''Latchmere Common''. The common was increasingly converted to allotments at the end of the 19th-century. Pressure from the local

vestry A vestry was a committee for the local secular and ecclesiastical government for a parish in England, Wales and some English colonies which originally met in the vestry or sacristy of the parish church, and consequently became known colloquiall ...

to develop the land for housing resulted in the Latchmere Estate housing development led by local politician,

John Burns John Elliot Burns (20 October 1858 – 24 January 1943) was an English trade unionist and politician, particularly associated with London politics and Battersea. He was a socialist and then a Liberal Member of Parliament and Minister. He was ...

MP. Building work commenced from 1902 and was one of the earliest examples of public social housing development to be executed by a local council. The creation of the recreation ground and preservation of some of the historic amenity value of the land was a condition of the development and the park formally opened in 1906. Plans initiated in 1903 to extend the estate and develop on the recreation ground area itself were defeated as the developers were unable to fulfil an obligation to provide suitable replacement recreational land, and their proposal of a site outside the borough at

Wandsworth Common Wandsworth Common is a public common in Wandsworth, in the London Borough of Wandsworth, south London. It is and is maintained and regulated by Wandsworth Council. It is also a Ward of the London Borough of Wandsworth. The population of the ward ...

was rejected. It achieved notoriety very soon after, being the focal point of the

Brown Dog affair The Brown Dog affair was a political controversy about vivisection that raged in Britain from 1903 until 1910. It involved the infiltration of University of London medical lectures by Swedish feminists, battles between medical students and th ...

as the location of a statue to commemorate a brown dog involved in

vivisection Vivisection () is surgery conducted for experimental purposes on a living organism, typically animals with a central nervous system, to view living internal structure. The word is, more broadly, used as a pejorative catch-all term for Animal testi ...

. The statue was sited on a plinth in the central circular area of the park until, amidst the related controversy, it was removed and presumably destroyed.

References

{{reflist, 2 Parks and open spaces in the London Borough of Wandsworth Battersea