London Parks – West Ham Park

One of my favourite things about London are the parks. When you look at Google Maps, they may seem like small patches of grass, compared to the size of the city. In reality though, London is so big that what looks like a small green dot on the map can in fact be a pretty big park. I’ve been to many of them and I definitely plan to continue exploring London parks, so I thought I’d share those adventures here. Today I’m taking you to a not so popular West Ham Park.

The park is located in East London and it’s just a short walk from my flat. Despite that, it wasn’t until coronavirus lockdown that I discovered its existence. I used to stick to visiting popular places in central London, unaware of the parks near my home. When the lockdown came and I stopped using public transport, I needed to find some places to go to for my daily walks. I loaded Google Maps and realised that there were a few parks in a 15 minutes radius from my flat. One them is West Ham Park.

The park is a really decent size. Most of it is just a big, open grass area, perfect for all kinds of outdoors activities. However, a fenced area on one end of the park is a beautiful – still big – garden full of colourful flowers.

The gardens were in their full glory around late April. Deep into spring, the flowers were at their peak and you could see pretty much any colour of the rainbow.

There are of course some animals in the park – the famous green London parrots (pretty hard to get a photo of in parks outside central London), squirrels and… turtles! That’s right, to my surprise, a small pond with an island in the middle (more like a puddle really, it’s a square of maybe 3 metres in diameter) is home to a few turtles. I’m curious to know how they got there (released pets or a planned addition to the park?).