Swan Lane Open Space

About

Swan Lane Open Space is a public park in Whetstone in the London Borough of Barnet. It is the smallest of Barnet's sixteen "Premier Parks". It has a children's playground, a café, and a pond which was formerly used for model boating but is now covered with reeds and water plants.

Much of it is mown grass and trees, including giant redwoods and a Cedar of Lebanon, but it also has more natural areas managed for nature conservation. The park was created around the 1930s on the site of former gravel pits beside a nineteenth-century estate. The park was known locally as "The Pits" in the 1960s and probably earlier.

The pond is a natural spring. It was the scene of a tragedy in the early 1920s when children were drowned while playing in the disused gravel workings. According to a history of a local school, St John's: "Whetstone was the site of a number of gravel pits, particularly in the locality of Swan Lane.

They are commemorated in the name still used for the recreation area there. School documents record a tragedy on these pits, which were then disused, in 1925, when a 10-year-old boy who attended the school was drowned with two friends when a raft on which they were floating capsized...