Ups and downs in Leyton's parks (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

Ups and downs in Leyton's parks

3:46pm Saturday 1st August 2009

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Oh, my poor neglected blog. It is rapidly ceasing to be a weekly rundown of the news and becoming more an ad-hoc update on life at the WFG. So I’m updating it on a Saturday.

To be fair, I am working the weekend shift, so it’s not so bad. At any rate, I have something to blog about, and so I feel I should.

It seems a certain park in Leyton has become a magnet for anti-social behaviour and crime.

Coronation Gardens, just off Leyton High Road, opened at the turn of the 20th century and, to the untrained observer, appears just like any other park.

There’s a bit of litter, but nothing out of the ordinary, and it’s otherwise fairly well kept and quite attractive in an early 1900s sort of way.

However, the WFG has received numerous reports of drug dealing, drug taking and violence. Just last Sunday, up to 20 young men were involved in a mass street brawl near the park and a month before that, a man was found there with multiple stab wounds.

Residents say the streets nearby are always closed off for one reason or another and one even said he feared for his own safety.

And at 9.30am on a Saturday (I was there today, chatting to local councillors about the problem) a couple of people could already be seen drinking beer, lounging on a park bench.

So what’s to be done?

One problem is apparently ease of access to the park after hours. The fences aren’t that high and there are a couple of benches outside that make it none too difficult to hop over and get in.

The benches are to be relocated and there’s also the possibility of cutting back foliage so that the police can see into the park more easily.

But once that’s done, it’s hard to say whether the problem will abate for any length of time. And even if it is solved, it’s also possible it will simply move to another area and police and councillors will end up running round in circles trying to deal with it.

Finally, to make sure I end on a lighter note, the Beaumont Community Sports Day took place today. Apparently, there was an egg-and-spoon race. This fills me with hope for humanity. If you can still have egg-and-spoon races in a Leyton park, then something must still be right with the world.