Vauxhall Park

Vauxhall Park is an elegant public park with a large playground, tennis and basketball courts, and café, all set among impressive landscape planting. The Park stands on land once occupied by large houses including one that was occupied by Henry Fawcett, an eminent academic, statesman and economist, and his wife Millicent, one of the leaders of the Suffragist Movement. Following Henry Fawcett’s death, when the area was threatened with development, Millicent Fawcett campaigned with the Kyrle Society, Octavia Hill (an influential social reformer and co-founder of the National Trust) and local residents including Mark Beaufoy to fulfil Henry’s wish that a park was created here for local people. Fanny Rollo Wilkinson, one of the first female British landscape architects, was then commissioned to lay out the site. Vauxhall Park was first opened by HRH The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, on 7th July 1890