Stockwell Park Walk

The sources used here do not explain why the walk carries the Stockwell Park name. It shares that name with Stockwell Park House, the mansion that once stood at its west end, and with the Stockwell Park Estate built nearby in the 1960s. No source draws the naming link between them directly, so the connection is left as a shared name rather than an explained one.

A mansion once stood where the walk now runs. John Angell erected Stockwell Park House in the early 1700s on part of Harris Field, opposite Stockwell Common, at the west end of the present Stockwell Park Walk. Its pleasure grounds stretched as far as Brixton Road, taking in Harris Field, Long Field and ten acres of copyhold land held of Lambeth Manor.

By 1826 the house had become a school. It stood for over a century and a half before it was pulled down around 1882, when Benedict Road and Speenham Road were laid out across its former grounds. Speenham Road ran between the walk's southern end and Rumsey Road, though it no longer exists. On the Tithe map and again on the 1863 map, Stockwell Park Walk itself appears only as a narrow lane or path.

The wider area changed again in the 1960s, when the Stockwell Park Estate was built to the west of Wynne Road, truncating that street, as part of a larger post-war rebuilding either side of Brixton Road.

The mural remains the walk's most distinctive feature, a splash of colour against an otherwise utilitarian stretch.

John Angell built the mansion that gave this patch of ground its first identity. Two and a half centuries later, Stephen Pusey left his own mark on the same ground, painting the Children at Play mural that still looks down on the walk. Councillor H D B Chambers, Mayor of Lambeth, performed the opening on 9 November 1982.

Stockwell Park Walk today is dominated by heavy traffic and overshadowed by the O2 Academy's large rear wall. The mural of children at play remains the one touch of colour on that otherwise functional stretch.