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If you stand at the gates at the Abbey Road entrance looking into the park you can see a dip in the grassland to your left. This was the site of Repton’s Pool, which was part of his designed landscape. Although not a large feature, he suggested that the pool would add beauty to the site “by encouraging wild fowl to frequent the spot”. The area still floods after heavy storms although the water usually drains away within a short time.

There are many pictures of the pool during the early years of the public park and while it wasn’t officially a paddling pool it was clearly used in that way.  The pool seems to have been lost to the site after the second widening of Abbey Road.  There were two widenings of this road, formerly Slatchhouse Lane.  One in 1911 when a strip of land was given up from the park to allow for this and then a major road widening between 1925 and 1927 when a culvert was created under the road which is still there today, draining water towards Thimblemill Brook.  The pool was mentioned in Parks Department minutes in 1914 where small improvements were suggested and there is a photo of the pool dated 1921 but it is not marked on the 1938 OS map.

A discovery in the dry summer of 1976 by the park superintendent, Keith Hutchinson, reveals that what was there was man made:

"The ground shrunk that much that the bricks that it was made with came through.  The turf shrunk...and we found out that it was hand built.  It was made in a herringbone fashion with medium sized bricks.  Really, really cleverly done.  So it was handmade and not a natural pool."

You can hear Keith talk about that discovery here  clip 24

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