Beaconsfield Gardens

Beaconsfield Gardens is just north of Acton Green Common (q.v.), the site of the famous battle in the Civil War in 1642 when the Parliamentarians drove Charles I’s royalist soldiers northwards towards Acton Town. At that time most of the land north of Acton Green and Turnham Green was commonland, with grazing and orchards. Enclosure of the commonland took place after 1860 and house building was in progress by the 1870s. Beaconsfield Road was built as terraced housing on one side of the street with shops on the other side, including a greengrocer, shoe repairer and bakery. In the 1970s the houses and shops were demolished and a red-brick council housing estate, Beaconsfield Gardens, was built on the west side of the road. The road was curved to provide car parking for the estate.

In 2022, despite being within Acton Green Conservation Area, Beaconsfield Gardens was essentially a linear strip of roadside verge, with grass and a number of trees; low post and rail fencing was installed along the roadside boundary in c.2015. In the autumn of 2022 Abundance London, a community organisation with charitable aims based in Chiswick, took the land on and began work on its transformation into public gardens. Assisted by volunteers, over 10,000 bulbs were planted, overgrowth was removed, paths mown and new trees planted. A bee hotel incorporating sticks and wood fragments was constructed, together with a stumpery to provide cover for insects and bird feeders hung from the trees. 

In March 2023, Ealing Council commissioned the Temple Group to carry out an ecological survey of Beaconsfield Gardens. Among the species recorded were bats, stag beetles, butterflies, moths and birds. The report described the site as 'a strip of amenity grassland alongside a main road, with mature scattered trees present around the boundaries of the site and juvenile trees planted in open spaces. The grassland is managed regularly and is relatively species poor. The mature trees provide limited nesting habitat for common bird species.'  After 2 years of Abundance London’s continual input of plants, wild flower plugs, bulbs, volunteer mowing and maintenance, Beaconsfield Gardens now delights walkers with its display of daffodils in the spring and in summer has colourful wildflowers such as purple knapweed, blue borage and white ox eye daisies. In 2024 the gardens were at risk of being turned into a 5G telecom mast site, but to date this has been successfully fought. Now a much-loved open space for local residents, the transformation was celebrated at an event in March 2024, attended by Rupa Huq, MP for Ealing Central and Acton, and Councillor Hitesh Tailor, the Mayor of Ealing. Beaconsfield Gardens were named 'Park of the Month' by Ealing Parks Foundation in September 2024. 

At the southern end of the gardens is a grassy mound circled by pathways, which local residents who have examined the Britain from Above website (Aerofilms collection EAW04850 England 1953) believe may cover the remains of a wartime air raid shelter that was in the rear of the southernmost terraced house.

Acton Green and the wider area of South Acton were for many years known as Soapsud Island and Acton Lane leading south to Beaconsfield Gardens had the nickname Soapsud Alley. It appears that many of the Victorian terraces contained laundries. According to the Directory of Acton Laundries 1843-1990 (researched and published by T. & A. Harper Smith) there were around 600 laundries operating in the area in the 1900s, a large proportion of which were owned by women and most of the employees were female. Acton Lane itself housed 19 laundries, most of them gone by the 1920s; there were 6 in nearby Saville Road, all gone by the 1950s; and Beaconsfield Road, pre-demolition, had 4 laundries, 3 dating from 1895. These included the Hillside Laundry at No.32 which operated into the 1930s and was sited on the opposite side of Beaconsfield Road that is now Beaconsfield Gardens.