Cottons Park: From Tudor Estate to Public Park

Cottons Park is the green space at the end of Cotleigh Road — two minutes' walk, and the nearest open ground to the street. It is also the only place nearby where you can stand on land that was a Tudor gentleman's estate, a wartime allotment, a decontamination centre, a rugby ground and a skate park, in that order.

This page is the history. For what is in the park now — the playground, the outdoor gym, the Friends group's summer events — see parks and green spaces.

The park today, in figures#

Nicholas Cotton and the estate that named the park#

The park carries the name of the family that held the land in the sixteenth century. Nicholas Cotton occupied a prominent position in Romford and built Cottons House on the site, and the surrounding land became known as the Cottons Estate — a name that outlived the house, the family and the estate itself, and is now attached to a municipal park, a residential approach road and a bus stop.

The estate's high point is well documented and easy to date, because it can be fixed against Cotton's own death. Queen Elizabeth I visited in 1568. Nicholas Cotton died two years later, in 1570.

A royal visit is a more substantial claim than it sounds. Elizabeth's progresses moved a household of hundreds, and hosting one meant lodging, stabling and feeding them at the owner's expense. Whatever stood here in 1568 was large enough, secure enough and well-enough provisioned to absorb that — which tells you more about the scale of the place than any surviving description does.

The long decline#

What happened next is the ordinary fate of a large house whose family stops being able to afford it. The Cotton fortunes fell away, the house and its grounds were not maintained, and the land reverted to scrub and rough woodland over a period long enough that the formal gardens left no trace anyone recorded.

By the nineteenth century the contrast was stark. Romford was industrialising hard — the brewery, the barracks, the 1839 railway, and street after street of terraced housing — while a large tract of overgrown ground sat derelict beside the main road out of London. The 1873 Ordnance Survey sheet reproduced in Havering's heritage report still labels it simply Cottons.

1920: bought against the owners' wishes#

After the First World War, councils across Britain were buying open land on public-health grounds — the "green lungs" argument — for populations living in dense terraces without gardens. Romford Urban District Council wanted the Cottons land, which was both derelict and unusually close to the town centre.

The family would not sell. What followed was years of what Havering Libraries describes as heavy negotiation through the family's solicitors, and the council is understood to have resorted to a compulsory purchase order to force the sale. In 1920 it acquired 15 acres for £4,500.

That last detail is worth stating carefully. Havering Libraries records the purchase and the price as fact; the compulsory purchase is the librarians' inference from the family's refusal to sell, not a documented order. This page follows the source in treating it as the likeliest explanation rather than an established one.

Laying out the recreation ground#

Clearing the site was heavy manual work, and the council put local unemployed men to it — a common arrangement in the depressed post-war labour market, and one that got the ground cleared while paying wages into the same households that would use it.

What opened was a formal interwar recreation ground: a putting green, six tennis courts hired out to clubs and individuals, pitches for rugby, football and cricket, a children's playground, and a central path running from the London Road entrance to a bandstand.

In 1922 a local resident, R. H. Page, donated fifty-three lime trees, planted around the perimeter. They are the mature canopy along the edges of the park today — the single most visible surviving feature of the original layout, and now more than a century old.

The site was renamed Cottons Park in 1927, having been Cottons Recreation Ground since the purchase.

The war: allotments, gas and shelters#

In 1939 the whole park was turned over to war use, and it took on three jobs at once.

Food. The ground from Recreation Avenue down to the old tennis courts was ploughed for allotments under Dig for Victory — putting a slice of the old estate back into cultivation for residents of terraced streets who had no garden to dig.

Gas defence. A large building was put up in the park as a decontamination centre, designed to strip, wash and treat civilians after a chemical attack. The attack never came. The building did, and it outlasted the war.

Shelter. Public air-raid shelters were dug beneath the park for people whose homes were too small for an Anderson shelter, or who were caught outside when the sirens went.

17 October 1940#

At about 11.30pm on 17 October 1940, a line of bombs fell across this part of Romford, starting near Allen's car showroom and running across the park to Recreation Avenue. Three of them landed inside the park.

One fell close to the entrance of the underground public shelter. There was no blast wall in front of it, so the blast travelled straight down the entrance and into the shelter. Nine people were inside. Six were killed, four of them children under ten.

The absence of a blast wall is the whole of it. That was the one piece of construction that stood between the people in that shelter and the blast, and it had not been built.

In 2009 six wooden sculptures were installed in the park, carved from Corsican pine, one for each of the civilians killed. They stand as a log circle and are the park's war memorial.

A note on the victims: local accounts identify the two households the dead came from. This site does not publish those names, for the reason set out on the history of Cotleigh Road page — naming the dead of a specific household needs a documented record behind it, such as a Commonwealth War Graves Commission entry or a civilian war dead register, not a secondary retelling. If you hold one, it belongs here and will be credited.

After the war#

The council did not demolish the decontamination centre. It was a solid building and money was short, so it was converted into a park pavilion and café — which is why the park's social building began life as a facility for treating gas casualties.

From 1947 the park hosted the Three Towns Show, run jointly by Romford, Dagenham and Hornchurch councils and held annually through the late 1940s and 1950s. It ran to vegetable displays — a direct inheritance from the allotment years — along with honey and apiary classes, poultry and rabbits, aquaria, handicrafts, a model railway, and band performances at the bandstand. It drew thousands, and for two decades it made Cottons Park the borough's main civic gathering ground.

Thirty years of rugby, 1953–1983#

Romford & Gidea Park RFC was founded in 1929, after two local enthusiasts advertised in a local paper and held a meeting at the Ship Inn in Gidea Park. The club moved between grounds — including Raphael's Park from 1949 — before settling at Cottons Park in 1953, where the players built their own clubhouse. It was at this point that the club added the town's name, becoming Gidea Park and Romford RFC and then Romford & Gidea Park RFC.

The club grew through the 1960s and 1970s, strengthened by an influx of Welsh schoolteachers who had moved to the area for work, and at its peak fielded five senior sides plus junior and mini sections.

That growth is what ended the arrangement. By the early 1980s the club had outgrown the park, and after a fundraising effort under club president Pat Ridley it bought a 15-acre site at Crow Lane, moving there in September 1983 — thirty years at Cottons Park, ended by success rather than decline.

The boundary that moved#

The park's outline is not the one drawn in 1920. In the 1960s the council built the Rotunda retirement homes on part of the perimeter, and compensated for the lost green space by compulsorily purchasing and demolishing a row of houses on Marks Road, adding that land to the park instead.

It left a small oddity that is still there. A surfaced path inside the park runs to no particular destination and stops: it was the back-garden access for the Marks Road houses that were pulled down. The path outlived the street it served.

The Friends, and Green Flag#

The Friends of Cottons Park were formed in 2002, at a point when park budgets across the country were falling and maintenance was slipping. Working with Havering Council, the group has drawn in external grant funding for new fencing and replacement play equipment, and it programmes the park's events as well as lobbying for its upkeep.

The park has held Green Flag status since 2009 — the national standard for well-managed public green space, judged on horticulture, cleanliness, safety, conservation and community involvement. It is one of a small number of Havering parks to hold it.

Alongside the mown pitches, the park keeps a wildflower meadow and areas of conservation grassland on a reduced mowing regime, plus ornamental shrub beds for pollinators. For a park hemmed in by the ring road, that peripheral planting is doing most of the ecological work.

The photographic record#

Four photographs are worth seeking out, all held by Havering Libraries Local Studies and reproduced in the Romford Recorder's account of the park. They are not reproduced here — see the note on imagery below — but they are the best surviving visual evidence for several of the sections above.

Cottons House. A tall three-storey brick house, plain and steep-gabled, with a pillared porch and sash windows, photographed through an orchard. This is the building the park is named after.

The Three Towns Show, 1950. A run of large marquees across the park with bunting strung between poles, and in the foreground a laid-out display garden labelled for the Hornchurch Urban District Council parks department — a detail that confirms in one frame what the written accounts say about three councils running the show jointly.

The flowerbeds, about 1964. A circular bed of tulips and wallflowers in red and yellow at a path junction, with the lime avenue behind it and terraced houses beyond the boundary. Formal bedding on this scale is the clearest surviving evidence of how the interwar layout was still being maintained forty years on.

The paths, about 1964. A curving asphalt path with men reading on slatted benches, bedding borders either side, and the pollarded limes running away towards the houses on the far edge. The trees are the 1922 donation, then about forty years old.

A note on imagery#

These photographs are third-party material. This site does not reproduce Havering Libraries Local Studies imagery — the same position it takes on the historic maps and photographs in the Romford heritage report — because crediting a photograph is not the same as being licensed to republish it. Linking to where they are published is. If Havering Libraries licenses them for reuse, they belong on this page and the credit line is already written.

What this page does not claim#

The research that prompted this page included two further threads that are not repeated above, because they did not survive checking.

An Iron Age and Roman origin. The claim is that excavations at Marks Lodge, off Cottons Approach, found a boundary ditch running from the late Iron Age into the Roman period, re-cut until the mid-second century AD, containing a mid-first-century jar holding the remains of a sheep treated like a cremation. It is an arresting story and it may well be true, but no corroborating record could be found — not in the archaeological literature, and not in any published Havering source. It is left out until someone can point to the excavation report.

Medieval feudal dues. Records survive of what neighbouring Havering estates owed the Crown: reeds for the King's chamber from Redden Court, pannage for the royal hogs from Mawneys, a sparrowhawk a year, cash towards the garrison at Dover. None of it attaches to this land. The obligations are real; the connection to Cottons Park is not documented.

Both are the sort of detail that makes a local history read well and is impossible for a reader to check. They are noted here rather than buried, so that anyone who does hold the evidence knows what would settle it.

Sources#

• London Borough of Havering, Cottons Park — area, facilities, entrances, wartime use, the 1922 lime donation, and the conversion of the decontamination centre.
• Romford Recorder, Cottons Park, Romford history during Second World War — the Cotton family and the 1568 royal visit, the 1920 purchase, the 1940 bombing and the memorial, drawing on Havering Libraries Local Studies.
• London Gardens Trust, Cottons Park inventory record — acquisition from the Cotton family by Romford UDC and the original layout.
• Romford & Gidea Park RFC, Our History — the club's founding, its years at Cottons Park and the move to Crow Lane.
• Green Flag Award, Cottons Park — current award status.

Dates and figures on this page were checked against these sources rather than taken from a single retelling. Where they disagreed, the more specific and better-attributed version is the one used, and where a claim could not be corroborated at all it is in the section above rather than in the narrative.

Related reading: the history of Cotleigh Road, the history of Romford town centre, and parks and green spaces for the park as it is used today.