Bedfords Park: City Farm, Deer & Walking Trails

Bedfords Park sits on the northern edge of Havering, at Havering-atte-Bower, at the point where outer London stops behaving like London and the Essex green belt begins. It covers 215 acres of rolling parkland, ancient woodland and unimproved meadow, and it holds Local Nature Reserve status alongside a Green Flag award it has kept since 2007.

Two things separate it from almost every other park covered on this site. It has a herd of red deer in a large hillside enclosure you can walk right up to, and it has a viewpoint with a permanent panorama panel naming landmarks up to seventeen and a half miles away. Neither is visible from the road. Neither is widely known outside the borough.

Most people who come here arrive for the deer and leave without finding the meadow, the walled garden or the lake. That is the main thing worth fixing before a first visit, and it is what this guide is organised around.

• Red deer herd
• London panorama
• 215 acres
• Free entry & parking
• Local Nature Reserve
• Nature Discovery Centre

The Red Deer, and the Feeding Rule Nobody Explains Properly

The deer enclosure is the reason most visitors make the journey. It is a large grassed paddock running down a slope, bounded by wire fencing on the path side and post-and-rail elsewhere, with metal feeding troughs positioned near the fence. An enormous old oak leans across the middle of the paddock, and the herd tends to gather in its shade during warm weather.

How close the deer come depends entirely on whether anyone is feeding them. When someone approaches the trough with food, animals will move towards the fence within a minute or two. When nobody has food, they graze at distance and the enclosure can look almost empty from the path.

The enclosed herd is not the only deer here. Wild fallow, roe and muntjac deer move through the wider park and are often seen by walkers, usually at the woodland edges rather than on the open slopes.

Autumn changes the enclosure completely

Red deer rut in autumn, and the character of the paddock shifts with it. Stags become vocal and territorial, and the roaring carries across the hillside. Essex Wildlife Trust promotes the rut as one of the park’s seasonal highlights. It is worth knowing that this is also when the animals are least interested in visitors and most interested in each other.

Why the deer are here at all

A separate board at the enclosure, headed “Medieval Royal Hunting Forest,” explains the herd’s origin: it is a living reminder that this land was once royal hunting ground, with red deer kept at Bedfords Park since the 1930s, when the park first opened to the public. Red deer are Britain’s largest native land mammal, and the board sets out the practical detail visitors most often ask about: a mature stag stands around 1.2m at the shoulder, hinds are a little smaller, and coats turn from bright red in summer to a thicker brown in winter. Calves, born brown with white spots in May and June, are often hidden by their mothers in long grass and are best left undisturbed if you spot one.

The rutting season, from roughly mid-September to the end of October, is also when stags wallow in muddy pools to spread their scent, and when rival stags lock antlers to establish dominance over a group of hinds. The board’s footprint guide is a genuinely useful bit of detail for the wider park: it lets you tell a wild red deer’s slot apart from the smaller fallow and the much smaller muntjac tracks you might find on the woodland paths.

The Viewpoint: A Panel That Names What You Are Looking At

Below the Visitor Centre the ground drops away to the south, and the park has installed a long curved panorama panel along the slope. This is more useful than it sounds. On a typical hazy English day the view reads as an undifferentiated grey sprawl until something tells you what is in it.

The panel identifies eleven landmarks with distances, running from local industry to the far side of the Thames:

On a clear day the view carries across the Thames into Kent, and the Essex Wildlife Trust welcome board describes the outlook as covering the cityscape of London and Kent together.

This is a fundamentally different London view from the famous ones. Primrose Hill and Alexandra Park both look at the skyline, at towers and landmarks arranged for photographs. Bedfords Park looks across the estuary edge of the city instead: docks, wind turbines, marshland, the flat industrial Thames. It photographs less well and rewards standing still for longer.

Nature Discovery Centre

The centre occupies the site of the old Bedfords mansion, demolished in the twentieth century, which explains why its position is so good: the house was built to command that view. Essex Wildlife Trust opened the current building in 2003 in partnership with Havering.

Inside there is a small café run largely by volunteers, a shop selling bird food, garden items and gifts, interpretation displays about local wildlife, and an education room used for school visits and children’s activities. Outside, chalkboards advertise the current programme, which during this visit included forest bathing sessions and wildlife-themed events.

Woodland, Meadow and the Lake Trail

The waymarked Lake Trail is the main route through the park, running downhill from the centre to the lake at the southern boundary. The park map marks viewpoints, play area, slopes and steps along the way, which is a helpful piece of honesty from the signage: this is not a flat site and the map says so.

Woodland paths are unsurfaced earth and gravel. In summer they are shaded, dry and genuinely pleasant. After sustained rain they will be muddy, and there is no surfaced alternative through the wooded sections.

A children’s play area with wooden climbing structures and swings sits along the trail; a sign at its edge asks visitors to keep dogs out of the equipment area.

The wildflower meadow is the part people miss

The meadow interpretation board records that 155 different plant species have been identified there, among them pignut, sneezewort and pepper saxifrage. The reason for that diversity is stated plainly on the board: the meadow has never been improved with fertilisers and has remained undisturbed for many years. Unimproved grassland of this quality is genuinely uncommon in Greater London.

The board asks visitors to look for large skipper butterflies, and sets out which flowers appear month by month from April through September.

What to listen and look for

The Essex Wildlife Trust welcome board sets out the wildlife worth knowing about before you walk rather than after:

• All three British woodpecker species can be heard drumming in the woodland
• Firecrests, among the smallest birds in Britain, are present
• Bluebells in spring, beneath centuries-old estate trees
• A deodar cedar and other exotic specimens surviving from the original planting
• A large winter rookery, often joined by carrion crows and jackdaws in the hundreds

The lake at the southern end is used for fishing and attracts the usual mix of waterfowl.

The exotic trees, and what remains of Queen Anne’s Oak

Several of the large, unusual evergreens near the visitor centre are over 150 years old, planted in the 19th century by Charles Barber, who owned the manor house that once stood on the site. A board along the path helps identify them: a giant sequoia, known in Britain as a Wellingtonia; monkey puzzle trees, native to Chile and Argentina; and three species of cedar, including the horizontal-limbed Cedar of Lebanon and the drooping Deodar Cedar planted in front of the visitor centre. The board also points out a round patch of brick and mortar beside the path, all that remains of Queen Anne’s Oak, a tree at least 200 years old whose hollow trunk was once filled with masonry to help it stay upright before it was eventually lost.

The Walled Garden: Check the Day First

Of the original Bedfords estate, only the tall red-brick walls of the kitchen garden survive. The mansion is long gone. What is inside those walls has been brought back from a derelict state entirely by volunteers, and it now grows fruit and vegetables, some sold to support the project.

A history board just inside the gate fills in the rest: the Walled Garden was built in the 1780s as the kitchen garden for the Bedfords Estate, whose own origins date back to the early 13th century, and it measures roughly 100m by 62m, with unusually high walls that created a sheltered microclimate for growing fruit and vegetables while also keeping out people and animals stealing the crops. The nursery that later occupied the site closed in 1999 and the garden fell into disrepair, until the Friends of Bedfords Park began campaigning for its restoration in 2011, working with the London-based charity Clear Village and Havering Council. Renovation work ran from 2013 to 2014 and included rebuilding the walls and restoring the Pineapple House, historically known as the Pinery, one of only a few surviving pineapple-growing houses in the UK.

Much of the volunteer effort across the wider park comes from the Friends of Bedfords Park, formed in 2003/4, who meet every second Sunday of the month for litter picking and habitat conservation tasks, and who resurrected this one-and-a-half-acre historic garden as a local food-growing community project. Garden volunteering currently runs Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00am to 4:00pm, matching the garden’s public opening hours. Bedfords is registered as a Park of Metropolitan Importance as well as a Local Nature Reserve and Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, and the Friends maintain a noticeboard near the main path with current works and public notices.

Getting There

By car, and a genuine satnav warning

The park entrance is on Broxhill Road, with free parking on site, though Essex Wildlife Trust suggests a £2 donation per car to help keep the centre running. There is a recurring problem worth knowing about: entering the postcode into a satnav routes several drivers to the wrong side of Broxhill Road. Approaching from the A12, the main entrance sits a little further round the bend on the left. Knowing this in advance saves a frustrating loop through country lanes.

A separate woodland car park serves the Trust side and provides the disabled parking.

By public transport

Havering-atte-Bower is reached by bus from Romford. Romford station sits on the Elizabeth line, which makes Bedfords Park considerably more accessible from central London than its green-belt position suggests. It is still a bus journey at the end, so allow for it.

Accessibility, Stated Plainly

This needs saying without softening. Bedfords Park is a hillside site and general access is limited.

The Nature Discovery Centre itself is wheelchair accessible and has accessible toilets. Disabled parking is provided in the woodland car park, from which a sloping path leads down to the centre. That part works.

Beyond the centre, the park becomes difficult. The site slopes throughout, and the woodland paths are unsurfaced and uneven, which the park’s own accessibility guidance acknowledges as especially problematic. The deer enclosure and the viewpoint are reachable on firmer ground near the top; the lake and the deeper woodland are not comparable.

Visitors who need level, surfaced walking will find Dulwich Park far more comfortable, and Morden Hall Park offers a flat riverside alternative with similar estate character.

How Long to Allow

The climb back up from the lake is the part most people underestimate. It is not difficult, but it is continuous, and it comes at the end when children are already tired.

Best Time to Visit

• Spring: Bluebells under the old estate trees; woodpeckers at their most audible
• Summer: The meadow at full diversity; woodland paths dry and shaded
• Autumn: The red deer rut, the park’s single most dramatic event
• Winter: The rookery, with hundreds of birds gathering, and the clearest long-distance views

Frequently Asked Questions