Access
Nearly all the perimeter of Wanstead Flats has a ditch, often with a bank, to prohibit vehicular access. The only vehicles normally allowed are service vehicles and bicycles. Horses may be taken onto the Flats and are supposed to keep to bridle paths marked by posts. There is considerable pedestrian traffic because of the large number of people living nearby and the availability of the area for activities such as the flying of model aircraft and kites, bird watching, botanising and the exercising of people and dogs.
Portions of the Flats are also maintained as football pitches. Fishing in Alexandra Lake is no longer undertaken and model boating in the old Model Yacht Pond ceased when the pond no longer retained water. The area near the petrol station on Aldersbrook Road (where the sports rooms are) was used in the 1940s to house German prisoners of war. At the pointed junction of Blake Hall Road and Aldersbrook Road is a deep dip in the grass area. This was a World War II bomb crater. After the raid a wrecked United Dairies Milk lorry was found in the crater.
A weekly parkrun event is held on the western section of the flats, with the start at the Harrow Road Pavillion. The course is a two lap figure-of-eight, on a mixture of woodland paths and the edge of the football pitches.
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Famous quotes containing the word access:
“In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves.”
—Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
“A girl must allow others to share the responsibility for care, thus enabling others to care for her. She must learn how to care in ways appropriate to her age, her desires, and her needs; she then acts with authenticity. She must be allowed the freedom not to care; she then has access to a wide range of feelings and is able to care more fully.”
—Jeanne Elium (20th century)
“Whilst the rights of all as persons are equal, in virtue of their access to reason, their rights in property are very unequal. One man owns his clothes, and another owns a country.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)