Beckenham Place Park’s Wild Swimming Lake is part of a lottery funded £6.8m park regeneration project involving the re-development of an old golf course into a public amenity, featuring a magnificent wild swimming lake created from an existing defunct pond.

Miles Water Engineering were heavily involved in the design and then commissioned to construct London’s first purpose-built swimming lake for the public to enjoy wild swimming and other water sports like kayaking and paddle boarding.

The original pond was dredged and then excavated in order to make it many times larger. The works presented several engineering challenges such porous soils, lower-level ground water as well as overcoming extensive deposits of hazardous waste. The 283-metre-long, 45-metre-wide lake, was lined to ensure its integrity and then backfilled to give a natural finish. It features a shallow beach area for young children and new jetty.

The new lake is fed by a combination of an aquifer reached by a new borehole, ground water and an existing stream. The 3.5m deep lake is kept stable and healthy by oxygen pumps, with reeds and other aquatic plants naturally absorbing unwanted nutrients.

Beckenham Place Park is Lewisham’s largest green space at 96 hectares and is a designated Local Nature Reserve containing ancient woodland, wetland areas and a variety of natural habitats.

This recreation of an original Georgian water feature is considered to be the park’s ‘jewel in the crown’ and is now enjoyed by thousands of annual visitors.

The lake was opened by the Damien Egan, Mayor of Lewisham, and Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, the lake proved to be so popular that it had to be temporarily closed to enable crowd control solutions to be put in place. The park was part of the Mayor’s initiative to make the capital greener and healthier National Park City.