Pétanque at the Gipsy Hill Station Garden

Posted on by ncoop050

The first organised  game of pétanque was played in the Buffer Stop garden at Gipsy Hill Station in July 2021. Since then, Friends of Gipsy Hill have been working hard to create a high quality playing surface integrated into our community garden, working around and to protect the existing trees. In May we had the Gipsy Hill Station Pétanque Court Grand Opening and it is now available for the local community to use via The FoGH Hub.

The Gipsy Hill Station Pétanque Court was made possible thanks to:

  • Our wonderful community of neighbours, friends, and local businesses who supported the crowdfund
  • Sport England for the initial pledge
  • Local family businesses Universal Construction for making the court, helping us with the challenges of this unique site and learning how to build a pétanque terrain, and GNK Builders Merchants (West Norwood) for helping store and haul the materials.

Gipsy Hill Station Pétanque Court in numbers – what it took to get here!

  • 4 grant applications, with the last being a successful bid to Sport England
  • 1 day of excavating, shifting, and sorting materials
  • 3 days levelling and laying
  • 35 tonnes of material recycled across the garden including new rockeries, crazy paving, a new ramp and the formation of new steps
  • 35 tonnes of sustainable materials including crushed recycled brick and limestone to create a permeable, all weather playing surface which is functional as part of the day-to-day working landscape of the FoGH garden
  • 20 metres of sustainably sourced oak sleepers
  • 100 hours of volunteer time from February to April 2026, involving briefing, lifting and shifting, dozens of phone calls to builders merchants, landscape suppliers and quarries to get the right product, and sorting excavated stones into different sizes for reuse across the garden
  • 1 fabulous pétanque scoreboard, a tactile addition to our garden
  • 1 set of boules in our honesty box for playing

Thank you again to our garden volunteers, the Friends of Gipsy Hill Committee who kept and delivered the vision for the pétanque court, and to Gezim of Universal Construction who volunteered his own time to manage the work on-site, coordinate deliveries, and help lift and shift materials.

The new Gipsy Hill Station Pétanque Court is free to play on, and there are boules available for those that don’t have a set. FoGH have developed a new app to enable booking play time, as well as other volunteering activities in and around the Gipsy Hill Station Garden. The new FoGH Hub app is available on our website and will enable us to learn with the community how to make best use of the garden and ensure safe playing and enjoyment of this little gem in Gipsy Hill.

Garden rules apply.