# Cottons Park: From Tudor Estate to Public Park

*Category: The wider town*
*Topics: history, romford, parks, green spaces, tudor, war, recreation*

Cottons Park is a green space in Romford with a rich history dating back to the 16th century. The park has been used for various purposes, including as a Tudor gentleman's estate, a wartime allotment, a decontamination centre, a rugby ground, and a skate park. Today, it is a popular recreational space with a playground, outdoor gym, and summer events. The park has held Green Flag status since 2009, recognizing its well-managed public green space.

## Key points

- Cottons Park has a history dating back to the 16th century
- The park was once a Tudor gentleman's estate
- It was used as a wartime allotment and decontamination centre
- The park is now a popular recreational space with a playground and outdoor gym
- It has held Green Flag status since 2009

## Content

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](/parks-and-recreation).

## The park today, in figures

| | |
| --- | --- |
| Area | 6.43 hectares (about 15.9 acres) |
| Opened as Cottons Park | 1927 |
| Previously | Cottons Recreation Ground, from 1920 |
| Green Flag status | Held since 2009 |
| Entrances | Five: two on London Road, plus Recreation Avenue, Marks Road and Cottons Approach |
| Managed by | London Borough of Havering with the Friends of Cottons Park |

## 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](/history) 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](https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/25358766.cottons-park-romford-history-second-world-war/).
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](/romford-history) — 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](https://www.havering.gov.uk/parks-1/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](https://www.romfordrecorder.co.uk/news/25358766.cottons-park-romford-history-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](https://londongardenstrust.org/conservation/inventory/site-record/?ID=HVG011) — acquisition from the Cotton family by Romford UDC and the original layout.
- **Romford & Gidea Park RFC**, [Our History](https://www.romfordrugby.co.uk/a/our-history-17112.html) — the club's founding, its years at Cottons Park and the move to Crow Lane.
- **Green Flag Award**, [Cottons Park](https://www.greenflagaward.org/park-summary/?park=850) — 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](/history), the
[history of Romford town centre](/romford-history), and
[parks and green spaces](/parks-and-recreation) for the park as it is used
today.

## Source

- Canonical URL: https://cotleighroad.com/cottons-park-history
- Typed record: https://cotleighroad.com/index.json