Faded beauty: Whitehorse Rec is a haven of green space in Selhurst that’s in need of some tender loving care
THAT’S WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR: In the first of an occasional series, our intrepid correspondent KEN TOWL sets off to discover more about the various groups of volunteers who strive to maintain and improve the borough’s green spaces
This week, a man I met in a park offered to show me his nipplewort.
It all started innocently enough. I had a brief exchange of text messages with a woman called Catherine who told me that she knew a friend, Charles Barber, who wanted to recruit more friends to help out with his project to turn a past-its-best strip of greenery in Selhurst.
She gave me his contact details and I expressed my desire to meet him. He was exactly the right sort of friend. Charles is a Friend of White Horse Park.
After a couple of days – even the best friends make you wait – I got a reply: “Would you like to come and have a cup of tea in the community garden?” We settled on 6pm on Thursday.
Timber work: it isn’t known whether this bench was made from a felled horse chestnut tree
I got there a little early and had a look around. I took a little walk around the community garden and then across the rest of the recreation ground that the Friends of White Horse Park have adopted.
It felt like a peaceful haven next to a bustling A212, a precious piece of green space lit up by the evening sun. There are Friends all over the borough. We are blessed in Croydon, with a multitude of green spaces, and many of them are blessed with Friends who provide the care these spaces need, above and beyond the basic care provided by cash-strapped Croydon Council.
Croham Hurst has its Friends, for example, as does South Norwood Country Park. According to the official page on the official council website, there are 46 such groups within Croydon. We have a lot of parks that need a lot of looking after. They all need Friends.
The more popular and well-known places have many Friends, of course, but some spaces are less well-loved. Heavers Meadow, which I first visited in February 2018, appears to have no Friends at all (though Christine is trying to do something about that), and the space also known as Whitehorse Rec has just a few, among them Charles Barber.
Community: this Friends group is seeking new friends
I took a few photos of the park. It has a sort of faded beauty. At the north end there is a brightly-coloured, newish-looking playground, south of which is a stretch of tree-lined green space and, at the south end, a little community garden with carved benches and a slightly dishevelled array of plants.
Barber arrived a couple of minutes before the appointed time and apologised for being late and took me for another stroll around the park. He was keen, he said, to get the community more involved in the space. He praised the park’s neighbour, the Legacy Youth Zone, which had got local youth to paint a bench in the community garden.
He showed me the chalk planter that “looks good in June”. And he acknowledged that not everyone cared enough about the space. It was clear, for example, that previous occupiers of the bench had enjoyed a few cans of lager so much that they had been incapable of finding the bin placed for their convenience just a few feet away.
As a result, Barber said, White Horse Park’s Friends have a litter pick at 11am on the last Saturday of each month, meeting at the hut next to the community garden. If you are interested, you can let him know at charles.barber@gmail.com and he’ll make sure he has enough coffee, tea and milk to cater for everyone. Or just turn up – he’ll have enough anyway, probably.
Going along to the litter pick could be a good way of seeing whether you would like to become a more permanent Friend.
If you were to become a Friend, to go steady, as it were, you could get involved in Barber’s ambitious plans for the park. Ideas include a family-friendly school holiday event on Wednesday August 5 that might involve, among other things, encountering herbs and a butterfly hunt, and a bigger, more ambitious event on Saturday October 24, a Selhurst MiniFest, maybe, or a Selhurst Harvest Festival with football matches and input from local pubs (two of the local pubs are called the White Horse and the Dark Horse) and stalls and music.
We were clearly still at the brainstorming phase but, if anyone can do it, Barber almost certainly can, and all the more easily with a little help from some Friends.
Legacy: the nearby youth club provided the paint and artistry for this bench. Visitors provided the littering, with a bin just feet away
Barber has all of the passion and dedication of the lifelong gardener that he is, combined with a focused commitment to community empowerment. While he is grateful to the council for what help they have provided, he knows that Whitehorse Rec will never reach its potential without the support of local people. Without its Friends.
So, if you live within walking distance of the park – it’s just past the Lidl on the Whitehorse Road – maybe drop by one Saturday and see how easy it is to be a Friend.
In case you were wondering… It was only after I had left that I remembered that Charles had not shown me his nipplewort. Nipplewort is the common name for Lapsana communis, a flowering herbacious plant, which can be found in the park, some of the time. The name was coined in the 17th Century as “the plant was used to treat cracked nipples and ulcerated breasts”, and on account of the flower buds’ resemblance to nipples. So now you know. Maybe I’ll see it next spring.
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Croydon Council used to claim 121 parks and open spaces on their website, although this included some children’s playgrounds, each with a couple of swings and a climbing frame, but not so much as a blade of grass to be seen there. It is more important for the parks to have friends’ groups if they are in the north of the borough. Piss-Poor mainly got re-elected as mayor by convincing mugs in the south of the vborough that he would save their green spaces from housing development. But in order to justify that, he will think nothing of getting all the green spaces in the north of the borough built on, especially if they don’t have friends’ groups.