A Park to love in London. If you don't know it read this

Just near Golders Hill Park on the Edge of Hampstead Heath is a park I have been frequenting for sixty years.
This is no ordinary park, it's really exceptional in many ways. Let's start at the top of the hill, near "The Old Bull and Bush" a music hall turned pub where famous musical artists used to perform, go in the gate and you will see A wonderful cafe. Here you can get authentic Italian cuisine, such as home made gaspachio , with brown bread, a fresh coffee or wonderful ice creams. Go sit indoors or outdoors on the large patio. You can see for miles. 
If you take a lazy walk down hill you soon meet a pond where in my youth 50 Flamingos use to live, alas now gone, but next to this is a wonderful walled flower garden which has continually surprised me since my youth. In the centre of this are two elderly Magnolias and a goldfish pond with a copper statuette of a nymph playing with a fish. All around you you will find nooks and crannies with exceptional planting. There is a wonderful wisteria many many perennials which are continually cosseted and replanted (a giant scottish thistle is on display today). 
Leave the flower garden, cross a small bridge and you will enter a small forested area, here a horticultural artist has imported fallen tree stumps to make an architectrual disply. walk down the path, past the hand feedable squirrels, and you can get back to the park. Notice all around you are trees and shrubs many of a very unusual kind that I have never seen else where. Most walk past these obliviously, but a horticulturalist will be continually surprised by the trees and shrubs on offer.
Under planting the grass here, are the daffodil seas. Past a very odd (IMO) looking sculpture, that looks a bit like a part from a large drain, and you get to the animal park and play area for children. Various animals are on display, these do vary, there are often deer, exotic birds, owls, Patagonian shrews, donkeys and more.
If this is not enough, using another exit you can go past a small pond or two thruogh some birch forest where once neolithic cave men sharpened their axes, back up the hill, until you get to a simple walled area with a gate. Simply called "The Hill" you can enter and the land drops away to present another flower garden with a large square pond. transverse this and up some steps then you can go to an area of Roman Pillars decked in old roses. I remember my father cupping one of these when a mouse ran out onto his hand, there are other plants too, I remember a lovely established Abutilon. 
If you follow this path to its end, a journey of 500 yards (and with a view across London), you can go down some iron steps, past yet another established "Victorian" garden and out onto the heath again.
This area is a kaleidoscopic joy in the autumn. Up a small hill and you come back to Jack Straws Castle and another pond. From here it is easy to return to the cafe where you started, or, for the intrpepid traveller, a short walk will take you past the Spaniards Inn (where Dick Turpin held up stage coaches, and on to Kenwood House where a self portait by Rembrant, Hal's Laughing Cavalier and several Gainsboroughs are on view.
Out of the house, and down to the coachhouse, (with coaches still in stitu) is another wonderful cafe with wonderful whole food.
On your return, you can cross the heath (past a fair on Bank Holidays), back through to jack Straws castle, past thehouse where Elizabeth Taylot and Richard Burton lives out their love affair and back to the cafe.
I have not even mentioned the bandstand in Golder's Hill and it's concerts, nor the classical orchestra dome by Kenwood lake. 
For me though it is the flora in Golder's Hill which brings me back, possibly a thousand or more times in a life. I have travelled, but I have yet to find anything to better...

You will never be bored....

Z