A visitor who saw the park and its lake for the first time two hundred years ago commented: "I did not think there could have been so beautiful a place within seven miles of London". Yet just before the First World War, developers planned to drain the lake, lay out two roads across the park and build yet more rows of terraced houses. They were only stopped by the Borough Council, which after a long and heated debate finally bought the park and lake for £65,000.

The Councillors then preserved for posterity an area whose origins go back into the mists of time.  The park was certainly used by Thomas Cecil, Earl of Exeter, when he entertained James 1st with a hunt in the early 1600s. It was then known as the New Park, to distinguish it from the Old Park, where Cannizaro and the Royal Wimbledon Golf Course are today. The lake probably goes back even earlier, as water from the common must have drained there over many centuries, before going on to the Wandle. Its first certain appearance, however, is in a map drawn in the early 1740's, where it appears large, squarish and with marshy-looking edges.

The man who produced the present flower-shaped the lake was Lancelot 'Capability' Brown. He had been commissioned by the first Earl Spencer in 1740 to landscape the park and one of its major tasks was 'to improve' the lake. 'Water manipulation' according to one of his biographers, 'played a vital part in Brown's plans and he delighted to form a great tranquil lake'. He undoubtedly succeeded in doing just that here. He created a 30-acre lake, stocked it with fish, built a boathouse at one end and dotted the edge with the Greek and Roman statues on pedestals.

The Spencer family were delighted with their 'pond'. The Earl bought a mahogany bathing machines with the set of oil-cloth curtains. His son, George, went sailing 'in a pretty boat' and was very upset when he heard that 'some dogs have been bought into the park and had killed three swans'. He also got some tolerable skating on the lake, but when he went fishing only 'caught one poor miserable eel.' George's mother, Countess Georgiana, described what seems to have been an annual operation: 'the water is almost all let off and we had a most astonishing draught of fishes, a most curious sight, for as the net formed a small circle, it was quite alive with their heads, tails and fins of fish.'

When George, the second Earl, left Wimbledon Park House in the 1820's, the lake seems to have had no attraction for his successors, the Duke and Duchess of Somerset, even when they entertained the young Queen Victoria