Outdoors & Nature

Burgess Park

A hundred and forty acres made by demolishing the streets that were here, with a canal bridge left stranded in the middle.

Parks & commonsWildlifeFree

Southwark's largest park, and the strangest in its making: it was drawn on the Abercrombie plan in 1943, and then built by clearing bombed terraces, closing roads and filling in the Grand Surrey Canal, street by street, from the 1950s to the 1980s. The result is a park with the ghosts of a neighbourhood in it. A bridge stands in open grass with nothing under it, because the canal it crossed is gone. A historically protected lime kiln from 1816 sits near where barges once unloaded limestone for it.

The living half is busy: a lake you can fish, a 400-metre BMX track built to national standard, seven tennis courts, and a five-kilometre loop that half of south London seems to run. Chumleigh Gardens is the quiet corner — a set of walled gardens planted as English, Mediterranean, Islamic, Oriental and Caribbean in turn, in the almshouses at the middle of the park.

It is named after Jessie Burgess, Camberwell's first woman mayor, and reopened in 2012 after eight million pounds of rebuilding.

Where

Albany Road, SE5 0AL

Nearest station

Kennington · 13 min walk

Hours

Hours from the page that lists them, checked 4 September 2026.

NearbyOutdoors & Nature

• Southwark Park27 min walk
• London Bridge: Brighton, the Downs and the Weald by train31 min walk
• Garden Museum38 min walk

NearbyOther Categories

• The Feminist LibraryLiterary London10 min walk
• South London GalleryMuseums13 min walk
• Orbit Beers TaproomBeer14 min walk

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