Betts Park

[2] It is approximately 13 acres (5 hectares) and has a number of attractions, including part of the old Croydon Canal and the Heart of Anerley obelisk.

The current park was opened in December 1928 and extended throughout the 1930s,[3] with the final addition of "new fields" by the King George V Memorial Trust in 1937.

[5] The land where Betts Park now stands originally contained a semi-enclosed coppice on Penge Common known as Clay Copse.

[10] Betts Park contains one of the last remnants of the short-lived Croydon Canal,[11] a Millennium Rock (a boulder of Lewisian Gneiss gifted by the people of Lochinver in Scotland), a veteran holm oak believed to be a survivor of Penge Common and the 6m Heart of Anerley obelisk erected in 2024[12] as a monument to all the people whose names are never written on monuments.

In the extreme heatwave of July 2022, the grass to the north of the park discoloured to reveal a ghost image of Oak Lawn villa, which had been demolished in the late 1960s.

On 12 July 2020, Dean Edwards was shot and killed at the Croydon Road entrance to the park,[16] in an apparent case of mistaken identity.