Valentines Park: Boating Lake, Mansion & Splash Park

Valentines Park in Ilford is a public park wrapped around a private estate that was never quite dismantled. The mansion still stands, the eighteenth-century canal still runs, the ha-ha still divides the formal gardens from the parkland, and a small brick well sits in the trees with no confirmed date of construction. Most visitors come for the lake and the cricket and never find any of it.

The park covers around 52 hectares and holds Grade II listed status for its historic landscape. The mansion at its northern end is listed Grade II*, a higher grade again. That combination is unusual in outer East London, where estate landscapes of this age rarely survived the twentieth century intact.

This guide is organised around the historic core, because that is the part people miss. The playing fields, lake and cafés are easy to find on arrival. The ha-ha, the Long Canal and Jacob’s Well are not.

• Grade II listed park
• 1690s mansion
• Free entry
• 18th-century ha-ha
• Walled garden
• Jacob’s Well

The Mansion, and the Question of Who It Was Built For

Valentines Mansion was built in 1696 or 1697. Who it was actually built for is less settled than most short descriptions suggest, and both answers turn up on site.

The mansion is widely described as having been built for James Chadwick, a wealthy merchant, and this is the version most visitors encounter first. The garden exhibition board within the walled garden gives a different account: that the house was built for Elizabeth Tillotson and her family following the death of her husband, John Tillotson, Archbishop of Canterbury. Elizabeth was also a niece of Oliver Cromwell.

The two accounts are reconcilable. Chadwick was Elizabeth Tillotson’s son-in-law, and is generally credited with erecting the building rather than commissioning it as his own residence. He died in 1697, the year it was completed. Elizabeth Tillotson died in 1702.

The distinction is worth keeping because it changes what the house is. On one reading it is a merchant’s country villa. On the other it is a residence built for the widow of the most senior clergyman in England, on land that then stood in open countryside within what had been the royal forest of Hainault.

The mansion passed through several hands before reaching Robert Surman, a City banker and Deputy Cashier at the South Sea Company, who acquired it in 1724. Surman is the figure who shaped what you now walk through: he enlarged the house and created the walled gardens, the dovecote, the grottoes and the formal water features. Almost everything of interest in the northern part of the park dates from his three decades of ownership.

The house was restored and reopened to the public in 2009 after standing empty for fifteen years. Entry is free.

The Ha-Ha: The Feature Most Visitors Walk Over Without Noticing

Between the mansion’s formal gardens and the open parkland runs a ha-ha, and it is worth understanding before you cross it.

Once you know what you are looking for, it reframes the whole northern section. The view from the mansion was engineered, and the ha-ha is the piece of engineering that made it work.

The Long Canal and the Water System

The formal canal running below the mansion is one of the estate’s most striking surviving features. It was laid out with rockwork and grotto elements to create reflections and controlled sight lines from the house, and it dates from the Surman period.

The larger ornamental lake elsewhere in the park belongs to the same system, fed by the Cranbrook Stream. These were not amenities in the modern sense. They were designed views, arranged to be looked at from specific points.

The Walled Garden

Surman’s walled garden survives, and the reason it was built is more interesting than it first appears. The high brick walls create a sheltered microclimate, absorbing heat during the day and releasing it at night. That allowed eighteenth-century gardeners to grow fruit, herbs and delicate exotic species long before glasshouses were widely available.

The garden now includes a café in the courtyard and a small historical display. In winter the planting is quiet, with lavender providing most of the structure. Spring and summer are considerably better if the garden is your main reason for visiting.

Jacob’s Well

Tucked into the trees, easy to walk past, is a small brick-lined well. It is the most genuinely mysterious thing in the park.

Nobody knows when it was built. No record confirms a construction date. The brickwork style resembles the grotto and brick features Surman added in the 1720s, which places it plausibly in that period, but the resemblance is the only evidence. Some believe the well sits on a much older natural spring that predates the formal landscaping entirely.

A source writing in 1901 recorded something odd about it: the well had never been known to freeze over, even in the severest winters, and during sharp frosts it gave off steam or vapour. That is consistent with a spring-fed source at constant ground temperature, and it supports the idea that the well was built around water that was already there.

The Rest of the Park

How the Park Became Public

Valentines Park was not created in one act. It was assembled from separate purchases and gifts between 1898 and the 1920s. Ilford’s officials were explicit about why: without an area of relaxation and pleasure set aside, they believed the growing urban population would erase every trace of rural Ilford.

The first section opened in 1899 as Cranbrook Park. Sarah Ingleby, the last private resident of the mansion, died in 1906, and the council acquired the house in 1912. It has since served as accommodation for wartime refugees, a hospital, a public health centre and a council housing department before its restoration.

Getting There and Practical Notes

By train: Ilford station is on the Elizabeth line, which makes this one of the more easily reached historic estates in outer London. The park is a short walk from the station.

Terrain: The park is broadly flat, which makes it a considerably easier walk than hillside sites such as Bedfords Park further north in Havering. The main paths are surfaced.

Scale: The park is larger than it looks from any single entrance. Walking from the southern playing fields to the mansion and walled garden takes longer than most first-time visitors expect.

How Long to Allow

Best Time to Visit

Winter suits the historic core surprisingly well. Without leaf cover, the ha-ha, the canal and the structure of the formal landscape are far easier to read, and the park is quiet. Jacob’s Well is at its most atmospheric in frost.

Spring and summer are better for the walled garden planting, the American Garden and cricket. If the gardens are the priority, come later in the year.

Frequently Asked Questions