Once the grounds of Pitzhanger Manor, Walpole Park is a 28-acre municipal park in Ealing, west London, laid out around the early nineteenth-century country home of the architect Sir John Soane. Soane bought Pitzhanger in 1800 and remodelled both the house and its grounds, employing the landscape gardener John Haverfield to reshape the estate during the early 1800s. After changing hands several times, the estate was purchased by Ealing District Council in 1899 from the Walpole family, and the park opened to the public for the first time on 1 May 1901. The borough surveyor Charles Jones laid out the tree-lined avenues, paths and flower beds, with an outer path running close to a mile around the grounds and a planted pond near the manor house. The restored Pitzhanger Manor now operates as a house museum and gallery at the edge of the park, linking the green space to Soane's architectural legacy. Each summer the park hosts the Ealing Summer Festivals, a programme that has included the Ealing Jazz Festival, running since 1984, the Ealing Blues Festival, founded in 1987, plus comedy, beer and global music events. These festivals draw on Ealing's long musical heritage as the birthplace of British blues, and are run by an events company on behalf of the local council. For the rest of the year the Grade II registered park serves as an everyday green space for the surrounding neighbourhood, easily reached from central London via the Elizabeth line. A major Heritage Lottery-funded restoration in the 2010s renewed the park's historic layout, ponds and planting and reconnected it with the adjoining manor and gallery. Features within the grounds include ornamental ponds, a walled garden and mature tree-lined walks used year-round for walking, play and quiet recreation. The combination of a Soane-designed house, restored Georgian grounds and a long-running summer festival programme gives the park an unusually rich cultural role for a suburban green space.

Type: Outdoors

Address: Mattock Lane, London, United Kingdom, W5 5EQ

Opening Date: 01/05/1901

Outdoor Area

Pet Friendly