hikes.guideLake District

Broadgate Meadow car park

Grasmere

This page does not say whether there is space today. It says when the people before you arrived, from the National Park Authority’s own ticket data, and it prints only what a source publishes: no directory price, no guessed operator, no unverified bus time.

At a glance

What it costsPaid. The prices are on the sign at the machine, not published online
How you paypay and display; coins and cards (LDNPA, checked August 2026)
RingGo zone37313
DirectionsOpen in Google Maps drives to the car park, not to the fell
Find it///sprouting.inventors.shielding the Authority’s own three-word address
Half the day’s tickets boughtin the 11:00 hour
Busiest hour11:00
Busiest monthAugust
Quietest monthJanuary
Buses that stop here555, 599

Where it is

This car park, and the others we hold a page for. Distances between them are not shown: how far another one really is depends on the road, and we only publish that where it has been measured on the ground.

Getting here by bus

Last bus from Grasmere, opposite Heaton Cooper Studio. As timetabled from 27 October to 1 November.

  • Towards Kendal (555): Tuesday to Saturday 23:02; Sunday 20:02 to Windermere, 19:32 to Kendal.
  • Towards Bowness on Windermere (599): Tuesday to Sunday 19:15 to Bowness on Windermere, 17:25 to Bowness on Windermere Braithwaite Fold Car Park.

Last departures checked against the timetable by Lee on 24 September 2026. Timetables change; the live pilot at /buses/ has the day’s departures where a service is covered.

For your date, the last buses from Grasmere, opposite Heaton Cooper Studio, every direction we have checked there:

Walks from here

Walks in our route library whose start is within two kilometres of this car park in a straight line, from the same join that gives each route its crowding note. The distance on foot beside each is the walk from here to that start, one way, and it is not included in the route’s own distance and ascent.

When people arrive

24,085 tickets were bought at the machine between August 2024 and March 2026, and 20,273 RingGo sessions were started between April 2024 and March 2026. Read together, hour by hour, they say when the people before you arrived.

The busiest hour is 11:00. About a tenth of tickets (11%) are bought before 10:00, and the running total passes half in the 11:00 hour. 3% are bought before 09:00, the 11th-largest share of the 19 car parks in the release.

00:00: 201:00: 302:00: 103:00: 104:00: 105:00: 1506:00: 7807:00: 27108:00: 97209:00: 3,63310:00: 8,23211:00: 9,30712:00: 7,49213:00: 5,64314:00: 4,47515:00: 2,41616:00: 1,01417:00: 38318:00: 23419:00: 9420:00: 4421:00: 2822:00: 1523:00: 400:0006:0012:0018:0023:00
Transactions by hour of the day, every month in the release combined. The tallest bar is the 11:00 hour, which is also where the running total passes half.
The figures
Transactions by hour of the day
HourTransactions
00:002
01:003
02:001
03:001
04:001
05:0015
06:0078
07:00271
08:00972
09:003,633
10:008,232
11:009,307
12:007,492
13:005,643
14:004,475
15:002,416
16:001,014
17:00383
18:00234
19:0094
20:0044
21:0028
22:0015
23:004

The same curve, in the two months that bracket the year. August 2025: 3,407 transactions, busiest hour 11:00; January 2026: 1,296 transactions, busiest hour 11:00.

Raw data: Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.500. Contains public sector information provided by the Lake District National Park Authority and licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The aggregation by hour and by month is ours, not the Authority’s: it declined to produce an hour-of-day report and disclosed the transactions instead. The hourly figures are free to download as open data. Compiled 14 September 2026. A transaction is a paid ticket or a phone session, not a car and not a visitor: permit holders and anyone who did not pay are not in it, and one stay can buy more than one ticket, so it is not a count of cars or people in either direction.

The shape of the year

About 27,500 paid transactions a year, averaged over 2023-24 and 2024-25 — the 7th largest of the 20 car parks in the release. August runs 3.3 times January. The busiest month is August and the quietest is January.

January: 982February: 1,594March: 2,263April: 2,934May: 2,542June: 2,693July: 2,623August: 3,286September: 2,756October: 2,419November: 1,522December: 1,024JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
Paid transactions by month, averaged over the comparable years.
The figures
Paid transactions by month, averaged over the comparable years
MonthTransactions
January982
February1,594
March2,263
April2,934
May2,542
June2,693
July2,623
August3,286
September2,756
October2,419
November1,522
December1,024

These yearly figures come from Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.486, which covers 20 car parks. The hourly figures above come from a separate release, Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.500, which covers 19 car parks.

Left out of these yearly figures only: Jan-Mar 2026 is RingGo-only, a payment-channel subset, so it is left out of this monthly series. Hawkshead May 2025, and Cow Bridge before Mar 2024, are unexplained in the source and are excluded from comparisons.

Source: Lake District National Park Authority, FOI/2026.486, paid transactions by car park and month. Received 22 July 2026.

What this page does not say

  • Whether the car park has space right now. The data is when tickets were bought, in the past; it cannot say what is happening today.
  • A postcode. None is held for any of our parking pins, and none is invented.
  • An operator, a price, a capacity or a bus time that a published source does not state. A panel that is missing here is missing because nothing sourced could be put in it.
  • The prices. The Authority does not publish them online: its car parks page says the charges are on each car park’s signs (read 25 September 2026). It also advises carrying coins, because some machines cannot take cards without a connection.
  • Opening hours, a maximum stay, Blue Badge rules or a height barrier, unless a panel above gives one with its source. We hold none for this car park; the signs at the entrance are the answer.

Every figure on this page is regenerated from the committed data and checked, number by number, against it on every push. Corrections: lee@hikes.guide. See also the parking map and the two kinds of Lake District car park, and how early you need to be, which compares all nineteen hour by hour. What a day’s parking costs in bands, beside the bus fare, is on what each part of a fell day costs.