When the council's shortened golf course closed on 31 March 1952, the ground became South Oxhey Playing Fields.1,12 The estate had already taken the ground east of Green Lane, as Building the Estate tells.
The clubhouse
A clubhouse stood on Green Lane from 1912, yet the council says the building dates from 1930.8,59,65,418 The club's minutes for 1930 mention an extensive redecoration of the clubhouse.11 A woman who came to the estate in the early 1950s held her wedding reception in it, and remembers an enormous red brick fireplace along one wall.480 The old clubhouse later became The Pavilion, a pub and restaurant.1,8,65,418
From golf course to playing fields
The lower ground west of Green Lane was levelled for pitches in the 1950s. A pitch-and-putt course followed in the early 1960s, on the strip between Green Lane and Prestwick Road rather than on the fields themselves, which is where John Swain places it and where Oxhey Park Golf Club was later laid out.289 The higher ground further west was left to grow over, but old greens could still be made out long after, and John Swain could still see one in 2004.7,12,677
Swain lists what pressed in on the open space before 1989: tall pylons at the Sandy Lodge end in 1955, and natural gas pipelines laid along the southern boundary in 1963 to 1965.12
The council's plans say Three Rivers District Council has managed the site since it was created in 1974.13,170 John Swain dates the change of ownership to 1989, when the fields passed to Three Rivers from the London Residuary Body, which was set up to wind up the Greater London Council's affairs. That summer a local campaign formed to keep the fields open, amid fears of housing, roads or commercial leisure development.12,182 A 2023 council briefing gives 1989 for both ownership and management, so the council's own documents disagree on when its management began.13,183
In July 1989 the Watford Observer reported that Three Rivers District Council had told a public meeting it would buy the fields for £1.5 million and might then lease them for commercial leisure development. A resident who was there remembers gasps of horror in the room, and suggestions that residents launch an appeal to buy the fields themselves.182 Poor But Proud gives the price as £1.6 million.176 The Save Oxhey Playing Fields campaign ran through that summer, with yellow posters in thousands of homes across the neighbourhood, and the paper carried the full story over the following weeks.12
The lower end floods. Asked in 2014 why a rugby pitch there turned into a pond each winter, Swain gave two explanations and ruled out a third. The ground is a receiving site that waterlogs in long wet spells, and the club minutes record winter waterlogging of the fairways along the southern margin between the wars, where the underlying ground is clay rather than sand. The only other explanation he could see is that the levelling of the 1950s may have compacted the soil and spoiled its drainage.12 He doubted the local suggestion that an old filled-in water hazard lay under the pitch.12
How big the fields are depends on who is counting. Swain calls them more than 140 acres of quality parkland and extensive woodland, which is about 57 hectares, while the council's plan gives 49 hectares, about 121 acres.12,13 Neither says exactly what it counts, so the two may not cover the same ground.
Sport and play on the fields
Clubs made their home at the lower end from the early 1950s, among them Oxhey Estates United, Fullerian Rugby Football Club and Solus Cricket Club.12 Schools used the ground as well, and young people played their own games of cricket, golf, football and rugby on it.12 In the late 1950s a teenager from the estate practised his games on the fields and earned pocket money as a caddy at the golf clubs nearby.537 In January 1965 the fields held a major cross country championship.12 A man who moved to Carpenders Park about 1980 had first come over from Harrow to play the pitch and putt.678
Oxhey Cricket Club played here. A player who joined at fifteen in 1957 thinks the cricket club started on a concrete strip covered with matting near Muirfield Road before it moved to the old course, though he says he may be misremembering.654 The club's membership cards for 1953 survive.654 The player who joined Oxhey Cricket Club in 1957 says its pitch was on the Prestwick Road side of the ground at one time and on the Hayling Road side at another, and he could no longer remember which came first.654 He remembers a bowling attack of a left-arm quick, a medium fast swing bowler and a slow bowler of donkey drops who drove a London cab.654 The club's umpire had a heart attack in 1954 and afterwards umpired from a shooting stick at square leg in a white coat and straw hat, wrote the match reports that the Watford Observer printed, and was still umpiring when he died in 1965.654 Players remember teas in the Pavilion, a team mate who had played for Fulham, and another, a West Indian, who they believed had played for Barbados.654,679
For children on the new estate the old course was a playground, and they had their own names for its corners. One remembers disappearing over there for hours in the 1950s and early 1960s for pick-up games of football and cricket and for climbing trees, and a very deep hole they called the quarry, which they scrambled into and then climbed out of by harder and harder routes.12 In the early 1960s people still called the whole place the golf course although nobody played on it, and a resident remembers a spot they called the Wooden Bygones and another called Pretty Corner, full of rhododendrons.129 At the foot of a steep hill were the three humps, which are still there but now under trees, with a dell in the woods just beyond.680
About 1956 a light aircraft came down in a bunker beside the old 17th fairway. One resident remembers it flying over the houses towards Carpenders Park station, as though it were in trouble and trying to land on the course, and another recalls it as a twin-engined Miles Gemini.151 Children climbed over the wreck and stripped it for souvenirs, and another resident remembers a policeman standing guard over it.151
The same ground served for everything else. About 1960 children paid a penny a minute for riding lessons on a pony and rode round the three humps, and girls from the estate kept ponies in the water works fields at Hampermill and could get from there straight onto the old course.680 They sledged down the steep hill on old trays when it snowed and rode home-made carts down it in summer.680 A woman who came to the estate in 1952 remembers fireworks over the old course on a night when it poured with rain.483
The Pavilion and the little course
The pub's name has been argued over. One resident remembers it as the Brookdene pub in the summer of 1970. Another says it traded as the Brookdene Arms for a while before going back to the Pavilion, and that an online pub guide still listed it that way in 2018. A third insists it was never called anything but the Pavilion.613
In 1991 a small nine-hole course, Oxhey Park Golf Club, was laid out on land between Prestwick Road and Green Lane.1,69 It measured 1,652 yards with a par of 29. John Swain, who played it a couple of times in 2003, says it ran from 1991 to 2017.289 One listing gives 2019 instead, but it confuses this course with Oxhey Park in Watford.1,240,241 Its clubhouse once displayed John Swain's original drawings of both the 1920 and the 1939 layouts, along with a collection of black and white photographs of the course taken between the wars.8,415
The pub closed on 30 September 2018.17 In July 2019 developers boarded up the car park and stopped local people using it as a cut through, which residents objected to.613 It was listed as an Asset of Community Value in November 2021, and a tribunal upheld the listing in 2024.238,418
The fields today
Hertfordshire's landscape study still calls this area Oxhey Golflands, and describes the disused golf course as unusual and locally valuable.287
A resident writing in 2012 described the year going round from her window: dog walkers in every season, football teams in theirs, golfers on the little course in fine weather, a summer fair that drew large crowds, and a new playground with a hammock and a tree house.681 She also noted graffiti on the new playground and the sounds of trouble at night.681
South Oxhey parkrun has been held here on Saturday mornings since January 2015.221 In 2023 the council spent nearly £470,000 of Community Infrastructure Levy, which is money charged to developers, plus £51,667 from the Lawn Tennis Association.251 The work brought a new games area, a fenced dog enrichment area, table tennis and chess tables, and refurbished tennis courts and skate park.251,252
The council's 2024 to 2029 plan proposes a new fingerposted route touring the holes of the old 1920 course, costed at £2,500 among its second-year tasks.13 The map on this site can already show the 1920 holes: switch on the golf course layer.
In April 2025 the council announced that Hertfordshire County Council had approved village green status for parts of the fields, including Hampermill Wood, Big Wood, Hampermill Spring, Round Spring and Ox Pasture Spring. The council says this keeps them open and protected from development.15
On 21 January 2026 volunteers, councillors and people from Northwood Headquarters planted more than 1,500 trees using the Miyawaki method. This Japanese technique uses dense planting of native species to grow a small woodland quickly, and it was the first time it had been used in Three Rivers.258,259 A plaque donated by Northwood Headquarters, marking the volunteers' work, followed in March.259