Southwark Park

Southwark Park opened in eighteen sixty-nine as one of the very first public parks created by the Metropolitan Board of Works. Before it became this green space, the land was a patchwork of market gardens, ditches, and watercourses. In the fifteenth century, the site was part of the domain of Bermondsey Abbey, a place where royalty once came to hunt birds and catch fish in the local streams. Local residents campaigned for years to transform this industrializing area into a park, primarily to provide a clean, healthy refuge for the community after a series of devastating cholera epidemics.