Get off at Pontoon Dock station in East London and before you lies a vast carpet of rolling hedgerows and lawn blanketing a space between the railway line and the silver domes of the Thames Barrier.

More than 500 trees add to the landscape, creating a 27-acre site of inner city greenery wedged between two modern housing developments.

It is an extraordinary sight, and an extraordinary achievement – a park forged just eight years ago from a contaminated site that once housed petrochemical and acid works on the riverbank.

Today the Thames Barrier Park welcomes more than 120,000 visitors a year, half from the borough of Newham, who otherwise have very little public space in a corner of London largely given over to new shoebox apartments.

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• Gallery: Thames Barrier Park, London

It took 25 years to realise the plans of the old Greater London Council which – under the then chairmanship of Ken Livingstone – first proposed the derelict plot to be suitable for a park.

Several twists and turns later, the irony was that Livingstone was there again in 2000 to open the park in his reincarnation as Mayor of London.

An international competition to design the park had been won by in 1995 an Anglo-French consortium, whose lead designer Alain Provost also created Parc Citroen in Paris.

Credited as the first largely post-modern park design in London, it is roughly a 250m square with a sunken ‘dock’ right across the site, aligned with the Barrier and Shooters Hill across the river.

There are 12 rows the length of Green Dock, alternating between undulating clipped yew hedgerows, strips of lawn and differently coloured plants such as agapanthus, geraniums and ceanothus.

The dock, which is up to 20ft lower than the rest of the park, supports “a hell of a lot of wildlife,” says park manager Paul Lewis, with thrushes, wrens and blackbirds all nesting.

At ‘ground’ level, the park’s design is also evident, with open spaces near the river, walkways lined with coppiced beech trees and linear planting of other species including birch, common oak and hornbeam.

Two colonies of bumblebees live in the park, one very rare, and year-round plants such as Mahonia japonica, flowering on my visit in November, provide food sources.

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