Victoria park

Victoria Park

Victoria Park or the People’s Park is set in Tower Hamlets and borders Hackney, Homerton and Stratford.

The winner of numerous people’s choice awards it’s no secret this beloved park is as popular with locals as it is.

Featuring two cafes, The Pavilion Cafe in the west and The Hub in the east. Two playgrounds, one on either side of the park with the one on the eastern side featuring a splash park, a skate park and some exciting big slides. There is a boating lake on the west side near the Pavilion cafe.

Victoria Park is used as a concert venue and hosts many festivals each year.

Victoria Park History

It officially opened to the public in 1845, Some say to stop the “rif raf” from using the other Royal Parks in the city others because of the recommendation of an epidemiologist William Far to alleviate the squalor of the East End as so many people were living with disease and pollution.

Victoria Park has been popular with East Londoners ever since. For some East End children in the 1880s, this may have been the only large stretch of uninterrupted greenery they ever encountered.

The park once had a bathing pond and a lido (or communal baths)

The people’s park became a centre for political meetings and rallies rivalling that of Hyde Park. A hot bed of socialist and revolutionary agitation born from the poverty of Tower Hamlets and Hackney, famouse for its own fierce brand of reformism.

Socialist speakers such as William Morris and Annie Besant would draw large crowds.