The incinerator, the nature reserve and the missing £2.2m bond
A deal to create a new London park has gone badly wrong

Morning — across London there are many examples of how a park gets made. Sometimes they’re the former estates of the wealthy that were brought into public ownership, like Brockwell Park in Herne Hill or Clissold Park in Stoke Newington. Other times, they’ve been projects that are national in scope, like the Olympic Park in Stratford.
But in south London, a borough council has been embarking on a different course: trusting corporations to create a new country park as the price of their commercial ambitions. The council approved a landfill, then an incinerator, in exchange for a publicly accessible nature reserve the size of Hyde Park. Yet today, three decades on from the first quid pro quo, the land is still basically barren.
Today we’re bringing you the story of Beddington Farmlands, a plot of land in Sutton that for many residents acts as a constant reminder of why they can’t trust local politics or deals with corporates. For naturalists, the lack of action has been particularly painful, as they’ve helplessly watched the wildlife they love go extinct.
And to top it all off, the project’s now seemingly lost its financial security, following the disappearance of a £2.2m bond that was meant to guarantee funding.
Our investigation into the 30-year failure to create London’s next country park is below.
“It’s an extinction event”: Inside the 30-year failure to create a country park in south London
By the Spy team
After years of unanswered requests for an update, it took an informal phone call for Sutton council to finally learn that money set aside for a new country park in London might be gone.
On November 1, 2024, Andy Webber, the council's chief planning officer, was on a call with Andrew Stokes, a technical director at Valencia Waste Management, a landfill company that is meant to be creating the park on a plot of land near the border between Sutton and Croydon.
But while discussing the company's stalled plans for the project, Stokes broke some bad news: Valencia had let a bond that guaranteed funding for the park expire.
In fact, the bond had expired five months prior to the call, unbeknown to anyone outside the company.
It was a potential catastrophe — that pot of money, worth £2.2m when it was agreed in the 2010s, had been the council's insurance policy, to be called in if Valencia pulled out of the park project.
Without it, Sutton council would have no way of paying to put its own shovels in the ground to get the park done ― aside from dipping into its already strained finances.
Such worries were shared by councillors on Sutton's housing committee, when they grilled Webber over the missing bond a few weeks after his phone call.
"Valencia have categorically failed us," said the committee's chair, councillor Jake Short, at the November 26 meeting. "There appears significant irregularity with regards to the financial bond," said cllr Tim Foster. "They've proven themselves to be absolutely arrogant and have very little intention of carrying out the work they are legally obliged to do," said cllr Ruth Dombey. Adding to their frustrations was the fact a representative for Valencia hadn’t turned up to the meeting.
Webber reassured the councillors that Sutton council was now considering legal action, adding that failure to renew such a bond was, in theory, a "prosecutable offence".
But to long-time observers of the Beddington Farmlands saga, the prospect of yet more wrangling was hardly surprising: the site has seen 30 years of broken promises from its various corporate landowners, and, indeed, Sutton council.
In the words of those who’ve fruitlessly fought to save the land for decades: “It's one of the biggest wildlife crimes to have ever occurred in Britain.”
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