Jimmy Burns - Editor Mike Bates - Production - Battersea Park

As a travel journalist, Sophie
Campbell has journeyed far and
wide across the globe, searching
for the idyll location. Here she
tells us what it is that draws her
back to her Battersea flat, and
out into the Park across the road…
ON South Carriage Drive, during
last summer’s heatwave, I came across
an elderly woman holding a lead. On
the other end was a Peke, three-quarters
submerged in a puddle, a coiffure
of centrally-parted honey-blonde hair
swirling lazily about him. The puddle,
in the molten heat of a globally-warmed
SW11, looked like a bonsai oasis. The
Peke looked like Jimmy Savile, or possibly
a new type of synthetic mop. ‘We
come here once a week,’ said the woman
crisply, ‘His favourite puddle. Keeps
him cool.’ They had been there for over
20 minutes.
The funny thing was they no longer
lived in Battersea. They came back for
the puddle. I like that sense of ownership
in the park; the conviction that one small
part of this most public of facilities belongs,
for a time, to you and you alone.
North of the Peke, five-a-side footballers
rampaged up and down the Astroturf
for their allotted hour, spraying sweat
in the heat. Beyond them, picnickers
colonised the fields between the cherry
avenues. Then came the cricketers – including
a pretty Indian girl in a crop-top,
tracky bottoms and a long plait – then
the dreamers in the library-quiet of the
English Garden, then the cyclists and in-
ON THE BENCH
Sophie Campbell
line skaters and kids on bikes, then the
runners and walkers, then the river.
We are bounded by the river, by luxury
flats and by daisy chains of expensive
cars, beyond which are the horrors of
London proper. Traffic. Murders. Chelsea.
No wonder we have fellow feeling.
We are so lucky not to be out there.
We are in here and we can argue with
each other instead. The pro-duck-feeders
(mainly under fives, or ducks), for
example, and the anti-duck feeders.
Pedestrians versus skaters. Skaters versus
cyclists. Skaters and cyclists versus
pedestrians. Everyone versus cars. The
people who think the little fences are
silly. The people who don’t. The dog
walkers. The contra-dog walkers. The
swearing birdwatchers (have you met
them?) and the RSPB types. The executive
joggers and the squads of 30-somethings
doing British Military Fitness. All
life is here, mildly irritated by all other
life. It is the equivalent of the beach in
Rio or Barcelona.
I think my favourite time in the park is
at night, though I never go in there. Ooh
no. Instead I go round the edge, walking
back across the bridges or from the
bus stop, staring in. In summer, you can
feel the enervated ground releasing the
heat of the day. In winter, it sweats cold,
which pours icily through the railings.
There are dim lights in there at night, and
strange rustlings, and the sort of people
that go into parks at night, and sometimes
the engines of joy-riders doing
hand-brake turns on the car park gravel,
though I haven’t heard them for a while.
The south east corner smells as rank as
zoo. Feral. Almost certainly fox.
In fact, they should do night tours of the
park. I’d sign up, if there was an armed
ranger. We might see the owl I mistook
for a mugger (it had the lousiest hoot you
have ever heard, the worst fake owl noise
ever, and I truly thought it was a signal
between people after my handbag until
my companion pointed silently up into
15
a tree. There was an owl, staring
at us with eyes ‘like twin hostile
moons’, in the words of one fine
writer. I still think it was eyeing
my bag, though). I’ve seen
a hawk in there, though I don’t
know what type, and bats, and cats. We
could have a Battersea Park Night Safari,
with a bush dinner in the café.
Increasingly, though, safari-goers will
see the lights of hundreds of new luxury
flats on Chelsea Bridge Road twinkling
along our eastern borders. By the time
you read this, the last block filling the
gap between the QVC building and the
new development may have blanked
out our last unbroken view of Battersea
Power Station. Then you will only be
able to see its familiar, lardy billiard-table
legs from north of the river, or from
the top of a bus passing the Dogs’ Home
– or of course, from the balcony of your
east-facing luxury flat in Chelsea Bridge
Wharf. Until the developers finally get
their way and knock it down anyway.
So, our isolation is complete. We are
now properly marooned, hemmed in
on all sides, and we like it that way. We
welcome visitors, it is true – especially if
they bring hard currency – but really it’s
our turf. We all own a bit of it, at certain
times and in certain ways, from the tennis
courts to the Peace Pagoda, from the
rose gardens to the café. But back off the
puddle, though. The puddle is taken.