History
Clissold House (formerly Paradise House) was built, in the latter half of the 18th century, for Jonathan Hoare, a City merchant, Quaker, philanphropist and anti-slavery campaigner. (His brother, Samuel, half-brother of Sir Joseph Hoare Bt, was one of the founders of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade.) The Park was created to be his idyll, and the stretch of water which wends its way around the house was once part of the New River, a canal that supplied London with clean water from Hertfordshire.
After 1811, the estate passed, via the Crawshaw family to Rev Augustus Clissold; but, when he died in 1882, developers closed in, and activists John Runtz and Joseph Beck convinced the authorities to open it as a public space in 1889. A fountain was erected in 1890 commemorating these heroes; later, the park’s two wildlife ponds were named after them too.
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