Woolborough Lane Linear Park
2026
Woolborough Lane Linear Park reclaims a previously overlooked stretch of National Cycle Route 21, transforming it into a vibrant green corridor that connects people, nature, and heritage. Designed as part of the Manor Royal Arts and Heritage Trail, the project enhances the northern and southern ends of the route between Woolborough Lane and Manor Royal Road, creating welcoming entrances, outdoor rooms, and spaces for rest, play, and reflection.
The design responds to community feedback and site-specific challenges, including poor drainage, cluttered access points, and a lack of identity. It introduces high-quality seating, playful features like chess and table tennis tables, and integrated public art.
Biowalls, meadow planting, and habitat features support biodiversity and soften the urban edge, while a sacrificial strip ensures the park is future proofed for potential cycleway widening. The result is a place that feels more like a park than a path, a shared space that invites people to linger, connect, and take pride in their surroundings.
An off-road pedestrian and cycling route between Manor Royal road to the north and Woodborough Lane / Napier Way to the south. The site forms part of the National Cycle Network Route 21. Zone 4 (green).
Andrew McKeown’s sculpture, “Connections”, evokes the industrial and organic spirit of Manor Royal, celebrating its post-war origins and ongoing evolution. The idea for this sculpture has been inspired by the physical shape and context of Woolborough Lane and the history of Manor Royal. The design is deliberately abstract, it is intended to be industrial and organic in appearance a strong reference to the manufacturing and engineering past of Manor Royal. The interlocking steel sections could look like giant grasses, oversized cables or sections from an engineering structure.
The name for the artwork ‘ Connections’ also highlights how well connected Manor Royal is internally, nationally and internationally. The industrial steel sections emerging, evolving, connecting and coming together; as people and businesses do in Manor Royal, as workers and visitors will do as they walk, run or cycle through Woolborough Lane.
Artist: Andrew McKeown
The words on the some of the larger sculptural steel sections are from a poem written by local person Mike Lewis called “New Town Pioneers”, which Mike submitted as part of the Arts Council Funded “Manor Royal Arts and Heritage Trail Narrative” (2019) project that has informed many of the artists commissioned by the Manor Royal BID. The poem is a sentimental re-telling of the “old” Manor Royal.
Here is Mike’s poem in full:
Each early New Town factory yard
at five o’clock through gates would free,
a wheel-to-mudguard bike clipped workforce
cycling homeward for their tea.
A sea of caps and gabardine
with knotted scarves and gas mask packs,
their lunch of bread and margarine
in tin box love upon their backs,
filled early morning by their spouses,
anxious for their hubbies’ health
so proud of their new council houses
in this post war commonwealth.
At dinner time the canteens clattered,
stainless steel the tea urns shone.
Last night’s telly all that mattered,
waiting for the dinner gong.
They raised a New Town generation
in civic neatness, freshly planned
without the slightest reservations
and happy in this Promised Land.
Free at last from war-blitzed squalor,
in modern metal-windowed homes
confident of what would follow,
and brand new-fangled Bakelite ‘phones.
But office blocks were soon appearing
on the spot where stood for years,
‘Bell Precision Engineering’
(What happened to Bell’s engineers?)
The factory sites now redeveloped –
Youngmans, Brentfords, they’re all gone.
What happened to the football matches,
‘tween Silentbloc and Redifon?
New Town Pioneers by © Mike Lewis 2004
