Parking in Wandsworth: Free Bank Holidays, One Big Catch

Wandsworth is an on-street borough. It runs three small council car parks and nothing else, so parking here means a controlled parking zone, a pay and display bay and a set of hours on a sign plate. Getting the hours wrong is what generates the ticket.

Everything below comes from Wandsworth Council and was checked on 31 August 2026.

The quick answer

On bank holidays you can park free in any marked bay in Wandsworth, without a ticket and without a permit. There are two exceptions: the Battersea Park area controlled parking zone, and the AFC Wimbledon event zone when a home match falls on a bank holiday. Yellow lines still apply everywhere.

The rest of the year, pay and display is £1.60 to £4.30 an hour depending on the street, a resident permit is £205 online, and residents get ten free one-hour visitor permits a year.

What it costs to park on the street

There are four tariffs, not three, though you have to read two different council pages to find that out. The parking tariffs page says there are “three main pay and display tariffs” and lists three. The visitor pay and display page, updated more recently, lists four:

The low tariff streets are worth knowing, because they are often all-day bays at less than half the standard rate:

• Birdhurst Road SW18
• Blackshaw Road SW17
• Grant Road SW11
• Magdalen Road SW18
• Maskell Road SW18
• Podmore Road SW18
• Spencer Park SW18
• Wimbledon Park Road SW19
• Windmill Road SW18

Payment is by machine or by phone app. The council allows a five minute grace period both when you arrive and after your ticket expires.

The council car parks

There are three, and two of them are in parks.

Battersea Park, Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm, including bank holidays: £3.40 for an hour, rising to £20.40 for six hours and £31.40 beyond that. Saturday and Sunday 9am to 5pm, again including bank holidays: £3.40 up to three hours and £6.80 over three hours. Motorcycles are free with no time limit. Blue badge holders get three hours free on weekdays and no time limit at weekends. RingGo users pay an 18p convenience fee. The park closes at dusk, and coaches other than school buses with a permit cannot enter. Those figures are on the Battersea Park area zone page.

Wandle Recreation Centre car park, Monday to Saturday 9am to 5pm: £3.40 an hour, four hour maximum, RingGo code 10059.

Burr Road car park, Monday to Sunday 8am to 6pm including bank holidays: £3.40 for one hour up to £13.60 for four, then £15.70 for anything longer. RingGo code 11695. Disabled badge holders and motorcycles are free. No coaches, and no minibuses over 16 passenger seats.

Both of the last two serve King George’s Park, although the council’s own tariff page calls it “St George’s Park” in the sentence directly under the King George’s Park heading.

Where parking is free, and the three traps

Bank holidays. The bank holiday parking page is unusually generous: no ticket, no phone payment and no permit needed in any designated marked-out bay. What still catches people out:

• yellow lines stay in force, and some bays are only bays for part of the day, mainly in bus lanes
• the Battersea Park area controlled parking zone still charges
• the AFC Wimbledon event zone applies if there is a home match that day
• the Battersea Park and Burr Road car parks still charge
• housing estate parking still needs a valid estate permit
• CCTV enforcement of moving traffic offences runs on every bank holiday

The car park exception is worth reading carefully, because the council states it two ways. The bank holiday page says there is “no free parking at any time” in the Battersea Park and Burr Road car parks. The tariff page says blue badge holders and motorcycles park free at Burr Road, and the blue badge page gives three hours free in the Battersea Park car parks. Take the tariff and blue badge pages as the detail, and expect to pay if you are neither.

One-hour zones. In parts of the borough the controls run for a single hour a day, aimed squarely at commuters, and outside that hour the street is unrestricted. Miss the hour and you are fine; park through it without a permit and you are not. From the council’s zone pages, the current windows include:

Those are permit-holder-only hours, so a visitor cannot buy their way through them. The full set of zone maps and hours is under parking zones, and there is a street-by-street search that returns the costs, hours and maximum stay for a named street.

Free one-hour visitor permits. Every resident permit holder is entitled to ten free one-hour visitor permits in a rolling 12 months, for use in the one-hour zones. They are only issued on request, by email to parkingpermits@wandsworth.gov.uk or by calling 020 8871 8871, and they arrive by second class post. Nothing prompts you to ask for them.

Permits

Applying online is £25 cheaper than applying over the counter, and a second car at the same address costs £103 more than the first. Prices are from the resident permit prices page and last changed on 3 June 2024.

Administrative charges on top: £11.40 for a refund request, £22.80 for a replacement or duplicate permit, and £25 if you apply in person rather than self-serving.

Visitor permits come as a paperless permit applied for online, or as scratchcards by post for residents without internet access. Neither is valid outside the zone it was issued for, and neither works in a car park, on a private road scheme or on a housing estate.

One thing to check before you buy or rent: new-build homes are often excluded from the zone and are not eligible for an on-street permit at all. The street search flags excluded addresses.

Blue badge parking

Inside Wandsworth, a blue badge lets you park:

• in any on-street disabled bay
• in resident, business, permit-holder-only and shared use bays inside a controlled parking zone, without payment and without a time limit
• in pay and display, pay by phone and voucher bays, without payment or a time limit
• for up to three hours on a single or double yellow line, with the arrival time shown on the clock

The three hour yellow line concession does not apply anywhere inside Battersea Park. Badge holders also cannot use loading bays, motorcycle bays, car club bays, EV-only bays, doctors’ bays or suspended bays, and cannot park on the red route unless a sign says otherwise. The full rules are on the blue badge page.

If you hold a badge and keep a car at home, you can apply for a dedicated disabled persons parking bay outside your house. The council will not mark one if you have off-street parking or an estate space, and it surveys the road first to check you genuinely struggle to park nearby.

Match days near Plough Lane

AFC Wimbledon’s stadium is in Merton, but the parking restrictions it triggers are Wandsworth’s. On every home league and cup match day, including Sundays and bank holidays, an event zone operates from 1pm to 8.30pm in three zones: Garratt Green G1, Earlsfield L2 and part of Tooting Broadway E1.

During those hours you need a resident or visitor permit, a blue badge, or a payment in a shared use bay, where the maximum stay drops to one hour. All yellow line restrictions in the zone run 1pm to 8.30pm too. Entry signs show the next match date. If the game is called off, the zone is not enforced. Friendlies do not count. The council’s event day page lists all twelve sign locations.

If you get a ticket

Wandsworth’s penalty charges are set London-wide by London Councils, and the borough is split in two:

Every bus lane and moving traffic ticket is charged at the band A rate of £160, wherever it is issued. Pay within 14 days and it halves. Leave it and a £140 ticket becomes £210 at charge certificate stage and £220 once it is registered as a debt, before any enforcement agent fees. The council sets that out on its PCN charges page.

Station parking: there is almost none

If you were planning to drive to the train, do not. National Rail’s own station data shows no car park at Clapham Junction, Putney, Balham, Earlsfield, Wandsworth Town, Tooting, Queenstown Road or Battersea Park. Clapham Junction is one of the busiest interchanges in Britain and has zero station parking spaces.

The only station car park in the borough is at Wandsworth Common, with 25 spaces and one accessible bay. National Rail does not publish a charge for it, so check on arrival.

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