Track 11 · High ground · 1:42
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Stop ten. Golders Hill Park.
This is the tidy end of the Heath. Thirty-six acres of Victorian park with mown grass, a bandstand, and a walled flower garden, all of it attached to a wilderness, which is a very odd thing to walk into after the Pergola.
There was a mansion here. A bomb removed it during the war and the ruins were cleared afterwards, so the lawn where the house stood is now simply the best place in the park to sit down.
What you came for is behind the trees to the north. There is a zoo, it is free, and it is properly good. Ring-tailed lemurs, donkeys, a collection of birds, and a small herd of fallow deer in a paddock that is large enough that you sometimes have to look for them. In summer there is a butterfly house. It is run by the City of London Corporation as part of the Heath, and there is no ticket office, no queue, and no gift shop at the end of it, which by the standards of London zoology is close to miraculous.
There is also a decent cafe, and this is the right place on this walk to eat something, because from here on there is nothing until the ponds.
Free. Open daily, and the deer are more active in the first hour.
Out of the gates, turn round, and walk back south-east up North End Way. It is a steady climb of about twelve minutes back to Whitestone Pond. Stop eleven is the large white weatherboarded building on the corner as you arrive.
51.56682, -0.18938 · where this is on a map