History
The opening meeting of the track was on 11 September 1954 which was the same date that the area became a public park. The running track was originally made of cinder. The field on which the track is situated was originally a polo ground and was compulsorily purchased from the Hurlingham Club after World War Two.
A grandstand was built in 1936 to replace an earlier version but it became run down in the 1990s and it was demolished in 2002. It had a capacity of approximately 2,500 on bench type seating. The stadium has been replaced by a substantial pavilion. The infield is a well maintained grass pitch and is used for either rugby union or football.
The track has a 200 metre (220 yds) straight on the home straight next to the grandstand which extends past the regular start line although the extension has been fenced off. The track was the base of London Athletic Club and the straight was last thought to be used for a race in 1979. A meeting was held with exactly the same schedule of events as the first open championship in 1879 and thus included a 220 yard straight race (200 metres)
The famous Monty Python sketch "The 127th Upper Class Twit of the Year Competition from Hurlingham Park" was filmed here in 1969.
Read more about this topic: Hurlingham Park
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“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
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“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)