James Overell Park

Everyday and all-purpose, and right on the water. That combination is the whole thing — there's nothing here that asks anything of you, and you're still standing on the Broadwater while you do nothing at all.

It's a place anyone can walk into without much fuss at any hour, the flexible, pyjamas-seem-fine kind of park where nobody's looking to see what you're wearing. Almost everyone here arrived on foot from somewhere within a few hundred metres, which shapes it. It never fills up and the people in it are the people who live around it.

The water is most of why you'd bother. There's a good stretch of grass and trees behind it and then the land runs out and there's the Broadwater in front of you, wide and flat and going a long way before it hits anything. Waterfront like this usually has something built on it, and this stretch just doesn't.

At high tide it comes right up near the grass and the whole thing looks like somewhere people would fight over. At low tide it pulls back and leaves flats and the smell of estuary, and both are perfectly normal and which one you get is luck.

Dogs are off the lead and there's enough beach at the bottom that they end up in the water whether that was the plan or not, and they tend to sort themselves out without anybody having to intervene. Pelicans and gulls work the shallows and nobody chases them off.

Between the birds and the water against the edge there's more to listen to than you'd expect this close to the towers, and on a weekday the loudest thing in the park is usually a boat going past. It's quieter here than anywhere else along this stretch.

What you actually do here isn't much. Sit for twenty minutes, watch somebody's kid throw things into the water, leave when you feel like leaving. Nothing about the place minds either way.

Evenings are the best of it, with the light coming across from the west and the towers on the far side starting to switch on, and for about twenty minutes it's one of the nicer places on the coast to be standing still doing nothing in particular.