East Putney’s Secret Garden
Fascinating!Fawe Park Road’s secret garden: 137 years old, full of wildlife, and about to go official.Network Rail wants to turn the remains of a Victorian flying junction into a community nature reserve.Buying a house that backs onto a railway line is one of those decisions people agonise over. The noise, the vibration, the feeling of living on the edge of something industrial. But residents on the even-numbered side of Fawe Park Road have always had a secret: between their back garden fences and the nearest track, there is a huge strip of green space, dense with trees and scrub, alive with birds and insects, thick enough to muffle the sound of passing trains and rich enough to support the kind of wildlife most Londoners never see. Most have probably never thought much about why it is there.The answer turns out to be remarkable. The green strip is the remains of a Victorian flying junction, built in 1889, whose track was ripped up more than 35 years ago. It already has formal nature conservation protection. And now Network Rail wants to turn it into a nature reserve.The strip runs in a long curve from near East Putney station towards the main line at Putney, roughly 400 metres long and up to 50 metres wide at its broadest point. Laid out straight, it would stretch the length of four football pitches, tucked behind a residential street. It traces the route of a railway track that was ripped up more than 35 years ago. In those three and a half decades, nature has done what nature does when left alone. Secondary woodland has grown up on the old embankment. Dense scrub provides cover for nesting birds. The kind of undisturbed grassland margins that support invertebrates, slow-worms and hedgehogs have established themselves along the edges.What makes this particular strip remarkable is that Wandsworth Council has already recognised its value. The corridor is designated a Borough Grade II Site of Importance for Nature Conservation, carried forward in the Local Plan adopted in July 2023. That designation gives the land formal planning protection. It means its wildlife value is officially acknowledged, even if most of the 381 residents on Fawe Park Road have no idea. The council’s Wild Wandsworth biodiversity plan, approved in February, commits to a full resurvey of all designated wildlife sites across the borough between 2026 and 2028. The Fawe Park Road corridor is one of them.Having walked over Woodlands Bridge hundreds of times over the years I never noticed this huge green strip of land although I do remember hearing the distinctive noise of the freight trains. This was posted on my street’s WhatsApp and the full version is below:https://putney.news/2026/03/29/fawe-park-roads-secret-garden-137-years-old-full-of-wildlife-and-about-to-go-official/
Sue Hammond ● 5d0 Comments