page_title: Burgess Park
section_title: Construction
hierarchical_section_title: Burgess Park / Construction
caption_attribution_description: English: Extract of 1945 Ordnance Survey New Popular Edition map showing the area that is now Burgess Park
context_page_description: Burgess Park is a public park situated in the London Borough of Southwark, in an area between Camberwell to the west, Walworth to the north, Bermondsey to the east and Peckham to the south. At 56 hectares, it is one of the largest parks in South London.
  Unlike most other parks in London, Burgess Park was carved out of a highly built-up area of the city. Virtually all the land now occupied by the park was previously used for housing, industry and transport infrastructure.
context_section_description: The idea for Burgess Park came out of the 1943 Abercrombie plan for open spaces in London, and the land has been gradually assembled and landscaped over the subsequent decades, first by the London County Council, then the Greater London Council, and since the mid-1980s, the London Borough of Southwark. The earliest component of what is now Burgess Park pre-dates the Abercrombie Plan. This is the King George's Field, opened in 1938 on the site of a former baths and swimming pool, at the Addington Square end of the park.
  An important stage in the construction of the park was the closure of the Grand Surrey Canal in the early 1970s, which terminated at Addington Wharf on Camberwell Road. The Canal served the Surrey Commercial Docks, and the area near Camberwell was full of 19th-century streets, houses and industrial buildings (including a R White's ginger beer factory and the Watkins Bible Factory), many of which had suffered heavy bomb damage during WWII. The stretch of canal now incorporated in the park is the site of Camberwell Wharf, which was virtually straight. Other land incorporated in the park was occupied by housing. While some of this housing was in poor condition, a lot of perfectly serviceable homes were demolished to build the park, and this resulted in strong local feelings about the park.
  Named Burgess Park in 1973 (after Councillor Jessie Burgess, Camberwell's first female Mayor), it is still incomplete and contains some former roads which have been stopped up but not yet grassed over. The boundaries of Burgess Park remain a matter of dispute, and because the park is unfinished, it is regularly the subject of proposals to build housing, schools, or transport links of the sort that would never be contemplated in one of London's older parks of Victorian origin.
caption: Original street layout (1945)
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