This is a pocket park next to the M4, north of Heathrow Airport, with lots of trees planted a couple of decades ago to mitigate the noise from its noisy neighbours.

It also lost the Frogs Ditch.

As a plot of green, it’s always been fields and never built on. As Hayes town centre slowly expanded after the arrival of the railways, it took an incredibly long time to reach the site of the pocket park today.

Even in the late 1930s, most of the area was still fields, and was part of Dawley Manor Farm, known as The Moats, as there used to be a small moat-like lake next to the farmhouse. It’s possible that there used to be a building within the moat, but it had long since been demolished.

The pocket park came into being thanks to a generous donation in 1937.

The family that owned the land, Miss Ada Philp (and Mr William Philp) offered to give the land to the council, to be named after her husband, the Sam Philp Playing Fields. They also wanted some of the land next to the park, which had been designated for housing, to be redesignated for light industrial use to create jobs for local residents.

The council agreed to the land donation, although not the change of use for the housing plots.

Later, the M4 motorway sliced the bottom off the park, and Hillingdon Council was given land at nearby Little Fields as compensation.

The arrival of the airport and the M4 motorway both jump-started urban development, but also limited how close anyone wanted to live to the new motorway. So, a recreation ground that might otherwise be surrounded on all sides by houses is still fairly rural, with fields to the west and south and a couple of large school fields to the north.

The pocket park was largely left open to lawn and used for football, but at the turn of the millennium, some 5,000 trees were planted along the southern side of the park to create a sound barrier from the M4 motorway. Carried out by Trees for London, the commission also included the now-decaying mosaics dotted around the park.

For a while in 1999, part of the park was nicknamed Minty’s Green after teenager Mark Kendal was killed in a motorbike accident. His nickname had been Minty after Kendal Mint Cake.

There used to be a ditch running through the park, called Frogs Ditch, but either it had dried out by the time of my visit, or it has long since vanished. According to archival photos on Google Earth, it appears to have dried out long ago, but its outline still forms the northern border of the millennium tree-planting.

Much of the land is still used for football, but the heavily planted strip on the south side is now a lovely, secluded space, the roar of the motorway notwithstanding.

The mosaics need some attention though.

Apparently, there’s an air raid shelter there as well!