Haggerston Park is an open space in Haggerston, in the London Borough of Hackney. It is bounded by Whiston Road (to the north), Hackney Road (south) and St Saviour's Priory, Queensbridge Road (west) and Goldsmith's Row (east).
The park was originally created in the 1950s and extended in the 1980s. It was carved out of an area of derelict housing, a tile manufacturer, and the old Shoreditch gasworks, which had been hit by a V-2 rocket in 1944 and badly damaged. Today, it occupies 6 hectares (15 acres)
Haggerston Park contains a small but luxuriant nature reserve and a number of football pitches. The park, one of the few formal landscaped gardens in Hackney, was laid out in 1956. Also dating from the 1950s is a long pergola walk on the north side of the park. In the 1980s the park was extended to the south to include a Hackney City Farm, on the site of a former brewery, a children's playground and playing fields.
On 29 July 1992, Michael Jackson landed at Haggerston Park in a helicopter with Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse where he visited the children at the nearby then children's hospital Queen Elizabeth Hospital for Children.
Haggerston Park received a Green Flag award in July 2008.
Famous quotes containing the word park:
“and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.”
—Sir John Betjeman (1906–1984)