Wakehurst parkrun

This week I was lucky enough to visit Wakehurst parkrun’s third event. The location is incredibly beautiful. It is a closed venue with extensive botanical gardens and an historical Manor House. Parkrunners are treated to free entry and free parking on parkrunday mornings. If they leave before 11am, that is. After that, parking charges will need to be paid, but it might very well be a worthy expense, if you can make a day out of it.

If you are still not sure about the beauty of these grounds, give a look at the Wakehurst website. The venue is owned by the National Trust (will it be added to the challenge?), but it is managed by Kew Gardens. A guarantee of quality and beauty, I guess. And of important conservation work.

I have been treating myself recently when it comes to parkrunday morning travels. 3 special, unique venues in a row, all of them definitely deserving to be on most parkrunners’ long term bucket list. Two weeks ago I ventured to the far Northern lands North of the M25 and visited the gorgeous forest trails of Wendover Woods. And last week I stayed more local, but still enjoyed the beautiful grounds of Osterley parkrun. Wakehurst parkrun truly tops this streak off in style.

Last week I recommended Osterley parkrun in case someone lands or has to leave soon after from London Heathrow. I guess now Wakehurst can now definitely compete for the top spot in case anyone has similar needs, but flies via London Gatwick. Sorry Ifield Mill Pond parkrun, you are great, but accept your second spot with dignity. You have the alphabet thingy going for you anyway.

Hopefully visiting Wakehurst parkrun on their third event I did not put too much undue pressure on the local team. It certainly didn’t show because the organisation here is spotless. Beyond spotless actually: the team is extremely welcoming and they cover all traditional needs and more. And everything runs like clockwork. I guess the high volume training is welcome, because I am ready to bet this will be a consistently busy venue.

Anyway, enough with myl rumblings. It’s time to dive into some more info about Wakehurst parkrun!

Trip to Wakehurst parkrun and parking

Wakehurst parkrun is located in West Sussex, relatively close to Gatwick, Crawley or Haywards Heath. The relatively out of town location makes driving to it the easiest option, unless you are local. However, looking at the official event site, public transport options are available.

If you want to reach it using the train network, the closest station is Haywards Heath. It is served by Southern, so if you are coming from London, you can reach it from London Bridge, among others, in around 45 minutes. When you get there, you are still 6 miles away from the venue, so the team recommends Bus 272. This could also be caught in Crawley.

As a lazy South Western Londoner, I drove to Wakehurst parkrun. The trip takes around 40 minutes from Wimbledon, with most of it taking advantage of major A or M roads. So, unless you get stuck because of roadworks or a crash, it should be fairly smooth driving.

Once it is time to leave one of the major motorways, it is still around 5/6 miles through winding country roads before you reach the venue. As the official course page says, careful when you get there. GPS will suggest entering Wakehurst from the staff entrance, which I assume would not be welcome. Follow the signs and drive another 100 metres for the main visitor entrance.

Special mention about the Sussex weather. Weird how I left London with an unusually blue and sunny sky and then when I reached the hilly areas, it was a continues in and out of foggy valleys and sunny hills. It is fascinating and I’ve seen it a few times before in this part of the country.

Anyway, once at the car park barriers, pick up a ticket and find a spot in the large area. If you leave before 11am, the cameras will recognise your licence plate and let you go without any charge. If you decide to make a day out of your visit, pay at the machine before leaving.

Special mention for the volunteers I met at 8:20am perched along the barriers, helping visitors with these instructions. An unusual touch which I am sure will be very helpful to many people who had not done their research in advance. Nice idea, Wakehurst parkrun core team!

Wakehurst parkrun: start and briefings

Unless you get there before sunrise, there will be people you can follow from the car park. But just to be safe, remember the main entrance will be close. So leaving the visitors centre entrance behind you, go towards the corner of the main car park and enter from a small(ish) wooden gate. Apparently, this is the schools entrance. Once through, after 20m you will meet the first of several toilet blocks on your right.

Leaving the toilets, or turning left ignoring the toilets, take a path that goes down a small hill and start enjoying the location. The impact is immediately great: the grounds look fantastic.

At the bottom of the hill you can already see signs and people coming together in front of the cafe by the House. Unfortunately, as of May 2024, most (?) of the House seems to be covered with scaffoldings for repairs. A good reason to come back and make a full day out of it.

The main meeting point is in front of the cafe, where there will be more toilets if you have changed your mind. The views are great and there are plenty of trees to provide shade in summer.

As a new location, the First Timers briefing was truly just for First Timers. As the volunteer said, most people will be tourists anyway, so the RD will give a description during the Main Briefing. Main Briefing that started a bit earlier than in other locations and could take advantage of an excellent sound system. Much better than in most other parkrun venues: regardless of the numbers, everyone could hear everything clearly.

When formalities are over, the start line is just a couple of metres away from the meeting point. Do you remember the hill you walked down to get here? Yup, the course designers decided to laugh at you: the start is uphill to go back where you just came from! Joking: the course design is genuinely great.

Time to go!

Wakehurst parkrun course review – star ratings

Wakehurst parkrun course review – route highlights

There were 464 parkrunners on the day I visited. Since it is only the third event, I will not try to extract a trend that will have no statistical significance. The inaugural event attracted 423 runners and the second one 335. With no data to base this gut feeling on, I am nonetheless ready to bet that Wakehurst parkrun will settle on attendance levels around or above 400 most weeks. With peaks in spring and summer. It is that beautiful and it is relatively easy to get to. Do we have the Fountains Abbey of the South here?

At around 400, the start is busy but relatively manageable. The course is fairly crowded with several areas where people get pretty close to each other, but it never feels you are getting in the way of each other. It is enjoyable and the team manages to make everything work perfectly. Hopefully it does not grow much beyond this level though, not to risk seeing too many people straying off the paths. That could annoying the staff and become an issue in the long term. Also, the number of volunteers needed to run this event is comparatively high: if you are in the area, please do consider gifting your time every now and then. It is easy and fun: just click here.

As I said, there are a few areas where things get slightly more congested. The start is definitely busy: it probably takes 10/20 seconds to get going and the requirement to stick to the paved path makes things a bit slower than in other locations. But at least it is respected, which is a good thing because we need to respect the beauty of the natural spot that is hosting us. The other slightly crowded point is the 360-degrees turnaround point midway through the lap. It is a fun downhill turn, but it is very sharp, so if you get there in a large group, you will slow down. My video embedded below shows it in two situations: busy and free flowing. Greetings to the young Darth Vader who was marshalling there marking Star Wars day, by the way. May the Fourth be with you!

Surface-wise, it is probably 2/3 hard path and 1/3 tarmac. No grass and no quicksands. The tarmac bits are great, with perfect, fast surface. The hard path ones are also pretty good, comparatively speaking. There is some mud on the sides, but the main path seems to drain pretty well. I think, unless you are visiting after very persistent rains, road shoes will usually be fine here.

Elevation-wise, the discussion is pretty simple. Wakehurst parkrun is never flat. Never. Ever. They don’t seem to know what flat means over there. And as I said above, the course designers channel their little inner sadist and decided it could be fun to show us what we were in for and decided to start with a small hill that leads to a steeper hill. Fun!

Jokes aside, at 79m of elevation gain over 2 laps, the hills are not particularly painful and they are compensated by long, fun downhill stretches. I am usually not a big fan of hills, but I have to say I have thoroughly enjoyed the Wakehurst kind of hilliness.

In terms of course design, it is a mess. A beautiful, chaotic, exciting and never boring mess. I will try to describe it somehow below, but as you can see above, it is a bit all over the place. I have to assume whomever designed it was not a German engineer. And if they were, they left the map on the breakfast table and their young kid did the work while they were not watching. But it works, and very well at that. There are some elements of curlywurliness in there, if not strictly geometrical.

A quick Relive route plot is on my YouTube Channel, with longer video highlights embedded below.

So, let’s see if I’m able to re-live the chaotic fun in my tired mind. After the Main Briefing, most people just turn 90 degrees towards the hill and slowly shuffle towards the incline, if there is room. What used to be a spacious blob of parkrunners turns into an excited tin of running sardines. In water, not oil, because that would stain the paths or disturb the grass.

Once it is time to go, people walk a few steps and then are able to start running under some nice mature trees to tackle the first mini hill. This is not too bad and by the time things open up a bit, you are on an imperceptibly short flat. It might actually be the one of only two flat segments along the whole course. After this short flat bit, it is time to turn 90 degrees right and tackle a steeper climb. Yeah, the Evil Course Designer (TM) has deceived us. The flat made us think we had survived the initial climb, but now we have to tackle the real one. This climb goes through a scenic tree covered path that will lead us to the top of the hill we had descended to reach the start from the car park.

Once you reach the top, the view opens up and you have a short descent on a larger path with a beautiful view on fields and landscaped shrubberies. Enjoy the way down and let gravity do its thing, you will need the time you can gain here. At the bottom, the team has magically put down a diagonal line to split what we will later see is a corner where the course touches itself in two different directions. Now, you turn left and go straight along a ‘main avenue’ for a short while, enjoying the sun.

It will soon be time to turn right and start the long straight-that-doesn’t-look-or-feel-like-a-straight that you can see in the bottom right corner of the Strava plot above. It starts mildly downhill and it alternates areas with shrubs on the right and meadows on the left with areas with blooming shrubs on both sides. It is beautiful.

Eventually, the scenery transitions into a mature woodland one and the familiar climbing is back. It is not steep and it is not long: soon it turns into a gentle downhill that gets progressively steeper until you reach the end of the segment and the (very) sharp turnaround point. The downhill continues during the turn and for a while after the turn: if you are not in a big group, it is pretty safe to take this fast since the surface is perfect, but it is quite likely some congestion will form, at least during the first lap.

Once you reach the bottom of this downhill, a 90-degrees turn with more blooming vegetation gets us into a section with narrower paths and the beginning of another little hill. Things are not very steep here, at least until you see an unusual concentration of beautiful pink flowers. Nice and beautiful things don’t come for free in life, so that’s a sign for a short, steep hill you can suffer through before another hard turnaround point to the left. After the turn, a short flat(ish) segment next to a gorgeous landscaped area with water features will welcome you. This bit leads to a viewing platform, so if you are tired you have the perfect excuse to stop and take a rest. Of course, we know you are not tired, but could not miss your chance for that great photo. Sure.

If you don’t stop, or after you have stopped and decided to restart, you will be met with another climb. You are rested now, so suck it up and get going. It’s not long and the view remains gorgeous, keep going. This hill is more evil than the others, but a little lake half through it will take your attention away from your screaming quads for a few seconds. Maybe. Probably not, if we want to be honest, ok.

When we reach the top, we are pretty close to the Manor House, so we can relax. We have made it and it is time to go back for lap 2, right? Nope. One more nice surprise conceived by our nice course designer. I’d like to meet them, by the way. 🙂

TIme to go around some gorgeous fields, which obviously look great and it is never boring, with different gradients and surroundings even in this segment. Yeah, the Wakehurst version of running around the fields does not resemble the mind-numbing one you often find next to schools and rugby clubs.

Once you are back once more, it is time to cross the Mansion’s landscaped gardens, run along its side and come out to its grand front. Turn left and parade in front of it, before reaching a larger lake that offers great views and another photo opportunity.

Soon after the lake, we will reach the shared corner we had run in the other direction before and see faster runners coming down for their second lap. Pushing back the resentment, let’s turn left and see the start area just in front of us. It’s time to run by the finish funnel and turn right to tackle fake hill and real hill again, to start the second lap. Normally, the second lap in hilly courses is something to endure. In this case, it is so weird and beautiful that I was actually looking forward to it!

At the end of the second lap, we can finally enter the funnel and be proud of our achievement. Scanning will be perfectly organised and efficient. Take your time, have a chat and cheer the other runners still coming in.

Congratulations on completing Wakehurst parkrun!

Facilities at Wakehurst parkrun

As I’ve already said many times and will probably say a few more, this is a great place. Plenty of things to do, look at or services to benefit from.

If you need toilets, there are two blocks around the start area and more around the route. If you want it, you can get the London Marathon experience without having to run it! Toilet break during your run and you might even avoid the queue!

The Stables cafe is open after the event. It is, again, genuinely great and better than most similar establishments at other events. Plenty of choice inside and I have to admit, the bacon buns looked very appetising. Shame on me for sticking to the sweet alternative. Staff is also pretty fast considering the number of parkrunners descending on them all the same time craving food and drinks and, if you want to be faster, there is a second counter with more limited choice by the entrance.

I think this place really comes into its own with good weather, with plenty of outside tables on both sides of the building.

As a competitor to the McDonald’s index, I am continuing to collect data for the parkbreakfast index: how much is breakfast at each location?

At Wakehurst parkrun, I ordered a single espresso, an apple&peach juice (fancy!) and a cinnamon swirl. This cost £8.65. Expensive, sure, but less than I expected given the location. The breakfast tax is how we pay for the pleasure to use these grounds every parkrunday, after all.

Wakehurst parkrun: Video Highlights

As usual, I’ve taken a few video snippets during the run to give an idea of the course. If you like it, please subscribe, it’s a fun past time for me 🙂

The other parkrun videos on my YouTube channel are all linked on the course review and video highlights summary page.

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Achievements and performance

Conclusions

What a wonderful event. The location is stunning, the team is awesome and the course is bonkers. This is unquestionably one of the best events I’ve run so far, and I’ve run quite a few. It is a great addition to the South East roster and I have no doubt it will become extremely popular.

It is not exactly around the corner for me, but fairly easy to reach. I am sure I will be back, probably dragging someone else with me as well next time.

Finally, obviously, thank you, Wakehurst parkrun team for your hospitality! You have done an incredible job setting this event up, best wishes for the successful future you certainly have!