The London Borough of Waltham Forest is an Outer London borough. The Borough manages over 500 acres (2 km²) of open space; also within the boundaries are parts of Epping Forest; and a series of reservoirs alongside the River Lea. The main areas of open space are as follows; there are also many smaller recreation and sports grounds:
- Coronation Gardens, near Leyton Orient FC ground, 1.65 hectares (map)
- Highams Park Lake (& adjoining park)
- Hollow Ponds, Leytonstone
- Langthorne Park, 1.89 hectares,
- Leyton Flats see notes
- Lloyd and Aveling Park, Walthamstow, 12.5 hectares: Lloyd Park opened 1900, contains the William Morris Gallery
- Memorial Park, Chingford (map) 3.81 hectares
- Wanstead Flats, Leytonstone
Highams Park, Hollow Ponds, Leyton Flats and Wanstead Flats are all part of Epping Forest which stretches from Manor Park in the south to Epping in the North. The boundary of the London Borough of Waltham Forest crosses the Forest by Connaught Waters, a popular beauty spot. The Borough also includes Chingford Plain and the historic Queen Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge in Chingford.
Famous quotes containing the words forest, parks, open and/or spaces:
“I have come to the conclusion that the closer people are to what may be called the front lines of government ... the easier it is to see the immediate underbrush, the individual tree trunks of the moment, and to forget the nobility the usefulness and the wide extent of the forest itself.... They forget that politics after all is only an instrument through which to achieve Government.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)
“... possibly there is no needful occupation which is wholly unbeautiful. The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it—whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend who will keep us delightful company all day, and who will make us feel, at evening, that the day was well worth its fatigues.”
—Lucy Larcom (1824–1893)
“Though there were numerous vessels at this great distance in the horizon on every side, yet the vast spaces between them, like the spaces between the stars,—far as they were distant from us, so were they from one another,—nay, some were twice as far from each other as from us,—impressed us with a sense of the immensity of the ocean, the “unfruitful ocean,” as it has been called, and we could see what proportion man and his works bear to the globe.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)