A teenager has been stabbed in the face in a Surbiton park, reigniting safety fears and demands to tighten night-time security there after years of complaints.

The attack happened just after midnight on Friday, February 6, when the man was walking alone through Victoria Recreation Ground, off Balaclava Road.

He was threatened with a knife and suffered cuts and bruises to his face, although his injuries were not serious enough to need hospital treatment.

The 19-year-old, from Long Ditton, was understood to have been drunk at time and can remember little of his ordeal or the two men who attacked him.

News of the attack has angered residents living next to the park in Victoria Avenue who had been campaigning to Kingston Council to lock the park gates at night for more than a decade.

They had endured recurrent problems with antisocial behaviour and crime in the park, including the mugging of a dog walker in March 2007 and an attack on a woman who was followed by a stranger a few years before.

A special meeting involving councillors, residents and the police was held in August 2007, but the council decided against locking the gate.

Instead, it promised to point an existing CCTV camera down Victoria Avenue and ask police to prioritise the area.

Elderly resident Olive Phippen, who lives three doors away from the park in Victoria Avenue, said the park is a no-go area at night.

She said: “The last time we tried to have the gate shut we had a petition, had meetings with the council, but we didn’t get anywhere. They just didn’t want to know. But as long as I live here I’ll keep trying.

”We hear so many screams and shouts because of the yobs that we don’t know if they’re genuine or not. One night there were terrible screams so I phoned the police and they said ‘what do you want us to do about it’. I haven’t bothered since.”

After complaints about crime and disorder in the 1990s, the council tried locking the gates at night, but this lead to the locks being broken, fence panels pulled down and people climbing over anyway.

In 1997, they were reopened 24 hours a day, in line with all other Kingston parks.

Ward councillor Barry O’Mahoney defended the decision to keep the park open all night. He said: “We have debated it several times over the last five or six years but the national advice is to keep park gates open.”

He said troublemakers would still climb over the gates or railings and locking the park would make it harder to police.

Kingston police are still appealing for witnesses to the stabbing. Anyone with information is asked to call Kingston CID on 020 8247 4909 or Crime stoppers on 0800 555 111.