Connecting green spaces

Hackney has one of the largest expanses of green spaces in inner London, with 58 parks and green spaces totalling around 283 hectares. Improving our parks and green spaces is one of our priorities – since 2010 there’s been £25m of investment in them, with a further £8m of investment planned to take place over the next few years.

Because many of our green spaces were designed in Victorian times, however, they can sometimes still resemble private, fenced-off gardens reserved for the few, rather than green spaces open to everyone. Rather than being open and welcoming, some spaces have rigid, inaccessible boundaries. Sometimes these barriers separate them from the wider neighbourhood, creating ‘islands’ of disconnected green space.

We’re looking to improve this by connecting green spaces:

• to the wider environment
• together
• to each other

Connecting green spaces to the wider environment

Some of the parks in Hackney are surrounded by railings or walls. Sometimes there’s a good reason for them, but it can mean the parks’ entrances can be hard to find or that it’s easier to walk around the park instead of walking through it.

We’ve found some parks where the railings could be removed or made smaller, or where the entrances could be widened, or new entrances added.

Things like lampposts and telephone boxes can make it difficult to see into parks, and sometimes pedestrians have to walk on narrow pavements next to traffic rather than taking a nicer route through a park.

The relationship between parks and pavements could be improved – some walking routes could be redirected through parks.

Connecting green spaces together

A number of parks in Hackney have roads running through them. This makes them smaller, makes it difficult for people to move between the different parts, and makes the parks noisier, with more traffic and pollution.

Most of these spaces tend to be in quieter neighbourhoods, so it might be possible to close these roads and return them to green space once again.

Connecting green spaces to each other

Hackney’s parks are generally surrounded by roads, and moving between them usually involves negotiating heavy traffic, so it’s rare for children to be allowed to travel to the park on their own.

At park exits it’s rare to see signs pointing to other local amenities, let alone other green spaces.

We’re looking at ways of improving the green links between parks. We want to encourage people to walk and cycle between our green spaces.

This will be done by making our streets more liveable, replacing car parking spaces with bike hangars and parklets. We have committed to planting 1,000 new trees in our streets by 2022, and adopting the healthy streets approach to streets across the borough.

Projects

Parks and Green Spaces Strategy

Green Infrastructure Strategy