Howard Park was created in the 1940s and named after Harold George Howard and his family. The park was presented to the people of Pitsea as a memorial to victory in Europe and became an important local open space. It is now known as Howard Diamond Jubilee Park.
Pitsea's war memorial was unveiled on 18 November 1928. Harold George Howard funded the memorial, which commemorated men from Pitsea and Bowers Gifford who died in the First World War. The unusual monument is topped by the figure of a Greek maiden holding a torch and an olive branch.
The memorial did not originally stand in the park. It occupied a prominent traffic-island position at the junction of Station Lane and the High Road. Major road changes in the late 1960s transformed this area and the memorial was moved to Howard Park in 1969. It is now Grade II listed.
Northlands Park represents a completely different era of Pitsea's history. Basildon Development Corporation created the park in the early 1970s on land that had formed part of Felmore Farm. The approximately seventy-acre landscape was extensively remodelled.
Northlands Park's two lakes were not simply decorative. Work began in 1972 and was completed by 1974, creating lakes designed to receive floodwater from nearby New Town development at Fryerns and Chalvedon. Artificial hills and landscaping were also formed as part of the park.
Howard Park offers a connection with inter-war and wartime community history through the memorial, while Northlands Park shows the planned landscape of the Basildon New Town era. Together they demonstrate that Pitsea's historic interest continued well into the twentieth century.