Park Life

We wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t expect great coffee from a park café – but things are changing, as Phil Wain discovered when he toured London’s green spaces

- Phil Wain

Parks and other green spaces provide much-needed relief from the intensity of urban life. London is particularly well served, from the large Royal Parks (often former royal hunting grounds) to churchyards and smaller pockets of public space around the city, often complete with playgrounds, bandstands and cafés. Not so long ago, a park café meant a pot of tea and a slice of cake – and pity you if you risked a coffee (usually commodity grade with extra hot milk). Now that is beginning to change.

Park pioneers

Rob Green and Brett Redman opened Pavilion in east London’s Victoria Park in 2008, where they were one of Square Mile’s very first customers – co-founder James Hoffmann used to deliver the coffee on a bicycle. Rob and Brett’s impeccably sourced and tasty food and coffee earned Pavilion a fabulous reputation. Although Brett has moved on and Pavilion has recently switched to Origin coffee, this continues to be the place to be on a sunny summer day – there can be few more attractive park café settings than Pavilion’s glass dome beside the boating lake.

In 2011 former Flat Cap Coffee man Lee Harte, who had worked at Pitch 42 in Barbican’s Whitecross Market, opened Giddy Up in Fortune Park, a small but locally beloved park around the corner from the market. Initially this was a stall but now Giddy Up is established inside a small permanent structure. Lee, who has also taken over a coffee shop in nearby Charter house Square, told us, “Working in a park gives you a different perspective on London’s weather. I’m cheered regularly by the comings and goings, especially in autumn in Fortune Park – so beautiful with dappled sunlight and haze. Even though spells of sun are brief and breaks in the weather are fleeting, they all add up to the rich texture of the seasons.”