![[Addiscombe]](../images/addiscombe.jpg)
![[Park Hill (Fotopic).]](http://images.fotopic.net/ynkmrg.jpg)
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Park Hill is a few minutes walk from the south-west tip of Addiscombe and it is certainly worth making that walk. It is mostly an ornamental park. There is a children's play area, three tennis courts and a netball and basketball court in the middle. The south end of the park has more elaborate planting and there is also a walled garden that includes ornamental and medicinal herb beds.
Park Hill lies between Fairfield Road and Coombe Road on the east side of the railway line. The main entrances are on Fairfield Road and Water Tower Hill.
Park Hill Recreation Ground opened on 11th July 1888, its fifteen acres having been purchased from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners the previous year. This was but a fraction of some two hundred and twenty-seven acres of land that had formed a deer park for the Archbishops of Canterbury for the best part of eight hundred years. The following year a bandstand was built.
On the aerial photo below you can see a bright tree a little to the north of the basketball/netball court which sits in the middle of a round paved area with four paths leading towards it. That is where the bandstand was.
In 1850 one John Horniman , a tea merchant, purchased land called 'The Warren' next to Park Hill and in 1853 he had a house built there. The house and gardens together were known as Coombe Cliff. In 1930 Croydon Corporation purchased Coombe Cliff for use as a convalescent home for children. It had several uses over the years before eventually becoming an adult educational centre in 1960.
The gardens of Coombe Cliff were merged with Park Hill Recreation Ground in 1964 to create Park Hill.
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