The park has been marked for regeneration. There’s talk of restoring “the historic symmetry of the site”, reopening the north-south axis. This was once one of London’s most famous pleasure gardens. Opened in the 1620’s, city folk escaped out here to the inn of Copenhagen House to take tea in the gardens, play skittles and fives, watch the boxing, shoot a few pigeons. The descriptions of it paint a Constable-like rustic idyll.

It was also a nest of radicalism almost as significant as Clerkenwell Green. The Gordon Rioters passed through on their way to burn the mansion at Ken Wood. One landlord of the inn was a member of The London Corresponding Society and held huge meetings here to put forward their Chartist aims and extol the virtues of The French Revolution. And in 1834 100,000 trade unionists gathered in support of The Tollpuddle Martyrs.