This small plot of land overlooks a very busy freight road and at the moment, also a large HS2 building site.

In an area dominated by the railway past and present and lots of light industry, a heck of a lot of what you see around you has been rebuilt several times, but not this pocket park. It somehow escaped being built on when all the rest was.

The pocket park sits next to Victoria Road, which was little more than a dirt track through the fields when the first railways arrived in the area.

By 1915, some workers’ cottages were built on the now paved Victoria Road, and some side roads were laid out around the pocket park, evidently intending to build more houses.

It seems the housing never arrived, as industry moved in instead, and by 1930, the roads laid out for housing had vanished under more railway sidings and yet another warehouse.

You can see the plot of land that became the pocket park in this 1934 photo – it’s at 9 o’clock, between the two rows of terraced housing to the north of the railway bridge. You might spare a thought for the people who moved into those first houses expecting to be surrounded by human neighbours, only to find warehouses moving in.

The pocket park was still just an empty plot of land when finally in the late 1950s it was laid out as a recreation ground and named Victoria Gardens. The exact date is hard to pin down, but it would probably be 1958-59 and in May 1960, Acton Borough applied for permission to create park bylaws for Victoria Gardens.

The next big change locally was in the 1990s, when the row of houses facing onto Victoria Road and the old warehouses behind it were cleared by Wimpey Homes to build a cluster of low-rise blocks of flats. So the people living in the homes on the other side of the pocket park finally got the neighbours they expected back in the 1900s.

If you want to cry, the two-bed flats were being sold for £66,000 for completion in June 1995.

And in 2018, the warehouses on the other side of Victoria Road were cleared away to make space for HS2’s Victoria Road construction site. When HS2 moves out, the site will be redeveloped for housing.

And that might see the pocket park get a makeover as well, as it could do with one, because if a park could ever look sad, this one would put Eeyore to shame.

Piled up on a slope – which wasn’t there in the 1930s, so presumably ex-building rubble, the grass is rather threadbare, and the random lumps of bushes seem almost accidental growth rather than planned.

The large stones dotted around do give a bit of character, but candidly, this is a park overlooking a busy road and a building site, and hardly conducive to pleasant relaxation.

Oddly, it might need to be renamed soon.

The Victoria Road and Old Oak Lane Development Framework document shows it as being renamed “Midland Terrace and Shaftesbury Playspace,” with a new Victoria Gardens being created on Jenner Avenue in North Acton.