Parks and Gardens by Penny Dolan

In my junior historical novel, set in Victorian times, the young hero arrives alone in Victorian London. Needing a safe space for the night, he considers climbing over the railings into one of the garden squares. Those green spaces were private gardens for the key-holders, the residents of the big houses nearby, and acted as distinct social spaces where children could play, infants be “aired” in perambulators and a variety of respectable adults could greet each other while strolling about.

Most of London’s squares and gardens are open to the public by day, and locked every evening to deter vagrants, although not always successfully. Returning to my hotel in Mecklenburgh Square around 11pm recently, I saw a young man hoist himself up over a set of spiked railings, drop down on the other side and disappear into an overgrown corner of the Coram Fields grounds for the night, just as I had imagined my own Victorian runaway doing in a fictional garden setting.

As cities grew larger and more congested, the private parklands surrounding an industrialist’s mansion or a wealthy landowner’s now-unwanted residence might be converted into a public space, such as the small park created around Bruce Grove Castle, although surely altruism was only one strand in the creation of such places.

These green parkland spaces were seen as a way of refreshing the polluted, miasmic city air and also as a way of improving the health, education and social mores of the urban population. Titus Salt, the Yorkshire textile manufacturer and temperance enthusiast, made sure his model village at Saltaire provided a park for his mill-hands, although he provided them with rules about how to behave within his park too.

Gradually, as the middle-classes increased and workers were granted half-days and holidays, parks became even more a social venue. The expected expanse of trees and lawns might include impressive botanical gardens, floral displays, bandstands and room for sporting activities as well as the obligatory swings, slides and see-saws of children’s playground area.  

In Harrogate, the old Bogs Field where spa visitors had once walked off the effects of the Spa purges, changed character during Victorian times. As part of town improvements, the area became the genteel Valley Gardens, intended to attract high-class visitors to the town, which it still does. 

The open grass acres of The Stray, where horse-races were once held, is still used by many groups and individuals during the week and weekends. They, and others, recently signed a forceful petition against some councillors wish to “improve” The Stray further by increasing the number of paying events planned for the much-valued open spaces. The local newspaper claimed the people's petition had won. It has, so far.

The city of Leeds has generous parklands too and one - Roundhay Park - offers another reason for the tone of my post here today. A private leisure company, providing healthy outdoor activities for children, had been in negotiations with the city council about taking over an area of park and woodland for their own exciting proposal. Local residents pointedly pointed out that at £25.00 per family visit, the new facility would not available to the families who currently use the park daily and weekly. Furthermore, the plans would cause significant damage to a much-loved natural habitat. Fortunately, the council took note and Roundhay Park still remains a public space. Yet the pattern of commercial encroachment seems worrying right now.

Moreover - and less noisily – many parks are facing deeper threats. Intense cuts in public funding mean that trained gardeners are often the staff of the past. The gardens in parks are now a facility that can be maintained, like libraries, by groups of keen volunteers. Alongside this pattern comes the additional matter of developers spying out prime land for housing and new planning regulations and I find myself worrying about the role of parks in the future.

Why were the parks created? Surely the increasing density of the urban populations will need open spaces just as much as the urban workforce of the past? Or will public parks, in this continuing age of austerity, be necessarily absorbed into the ticketed-leisure industry and recreated for a different ideology? In fact, will the provision and upkeep of public parks in Britain become, to all intents and purposes, history?

ps. I hope, by my next post, to have my eyes and words more firmly on the past. 

 

Penny Dolan

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Parks and Gardens by Penny Dolan

Most visitor trips to Harrogate will almost certainly pass The Stray - an open stretch of grass that borders the town centre – and then drop down Montpelier Hill to the “famous” Valley Gardens, our local park.

With a streamside walk, ice-cream parlour and ever-changing floral display, the Valley Gardens give a prosperous, comfortable air of the visitor side of town, where the day trippers mingle with conference delegates and others queuing outside Betty’s tea-rooms.

Public parks are such an ordinary, accepted part of our urban lives and so at the mercy of the British weather that we barely notice them. 

Parks are stages: they only appear in the media as places where an event is to happen, has happened, or a crime has taken place. Rarely in their own right.

While parks can house concerts and celebrations of all sorts, in general our public parks and squares are low-key places. Push-chairs are pushed in them. Kids play in them. Joggers jog in them. Friends have casual picnics in them. Teens skulk and prowl in them and lovers meet their loves.

Parks come in a variety of styles. Some are windswept, muddy grounds, like the “Rec” of my childhood on Wood Green’s Noel Park Estate. Others, like leafy Wanstead Woods, still have a pleasant wildness about them. However, thanks to Lottery funding and a keener eye on the “health and safety” of the equipment, some parks seem to look better than they have done before. There is more and safer play equipment, more defined sports spaces and more awareness of what people need from parks.

Yet that renewal will depend on where you live. Parks are run by local councils, for the greater good of the people and if ever there’s a principle that’s getting twisted out of shape by austerity Britain, it’s “greater good”.  Anxiety about that, and about how and why public parks came about set me searching.

For a park, the Valley Gardens has a curious history. Way back in the 18th & 19th centuries, money was to be made in the upstart spa of Harrogate by offering health treatments, particularly taking the waters, one of which is very potent brew.  The visitors were encouraged to promenade between draughts of the stuff, which gave them a chance to mingle and meet.

However, in my personal view, the original liquid with its sulphuric tang - most unlike the currently marketed bottled “Harrogate Water” - probably had such a strong effect that the consumers needed a polite space to cope with the gastric turbulence.  It was probably a bit too dangerous to wander discreetly on The Stray which the young bucks had already grabbed for random horse racing. 

Harrogate grew. With the 1841 Harrogate Improvement Act, local businessmen began promoting the town and its now-enclosed wells as a resort.  Hotels and theatres were built, the railway arrived, the Royal Baths Hospital was established and royal relations - just over the way in Harewood House – added glamour and gentility. No wonder the idea of the Valley Gardens covering the less sweetly named Bogs Field was a winner.

Both town and gardens rose to prominence in the early twentieth century. Set just below the Hospital, the Valley Gardens was used by invalids and convalescent officers sent home from the Great War to regain their health.

Health, in general, was one reason for the growth in public parks. When, in the mid eighteen hundreds, people flooded in from the countryside to the Victorian mills and factories. The polluted air and poor living conditions made some of those in authority worry about the health and the morals of the workforce.

Open air began to matter, and the idea of parks - once the private preserve of the wealthy - were seen as a way of raising the standards of the population. Urban planning encouraged this. There was legislation: the 1875 Public Health Act, the 1881 Open Spaces Act and the 1884 Burial Grounds Act, all encouraging improvements in land use within towns and cities for the good of the urban population. 

The Temperance movement were great enthusiasts. The great Titus Salt’s model village at Saltaire has a park among its public amenities, but no public house. 

Civic dignitaries and social reformers saw parks as a way of reforming of the population, of turning the people away from gross pursuits and providing them with healthy leisure activities. Parks would increase physical, intellectual and moral standards among the population. 

Many parks were funded by public subscription, especially those commemorating Queen Victoria’s 1887 Golden and 1889 Diamond Jubilees. Parks often kept the name of their main benefactor, reminding everyone of the importance of philanthropy. 

However, parks were intended as places for all. They offered space for strolling or games, and inspirational beauty in the form of fountains and lakes and “landscape”. They added a kind of cultural education through classical and commemorative statuary, entertainment through bandstands, and horticulture knowledge through their plant displays and botanical glasshouses. At a grander civic level, parks were the settings for galas, pageants, all levels of pomp, ceremony and fireworks and even opportunities for art displays and exhibitions. Do you remember the host of painted elephants around London’s parks a few years ago? Of course, parks and squares were hedged with Rules and Regulations to ensure correct behaviour.

Needless to say, the donating of parkland was not entirely an altruistic gesture. The grand houses had become more difficult to maintain, especiallywith property taxes. Some family estates that were built in the countryside had now been encircled by city streets. Donating an unwanted property had advantages, especially when the public park had your name attached.

So now, as spaces, parks come tangled with other issues. They carry so many shades of class and privilege and gentrification and middle-class entertainment that it’s easy to dismiss the benefits they bring. Yet, if ever there's a sunny summer day, the city parks fill up with people of all sorts enjoying themselves, especially those with no garden for themselves. Then parks show themselves as  good things.

But could these same parks - so much part of our history - slip away, be rationalised? Like the libraries, where only one per city is seen as necessary? When the poor can always take the bus?  And will the parks be maintained, still? The angry-eyed park- keeper – that icon of comics – may have become a set of CCTV cameras, but good parks still need the care-givers, the gardeners, the cleaners, the grounds-people to keep them pleasant places. How is that to be managed? Or won’t it? A volunteer system can be a great resource but, in my opinion,  only works as a long-term systemwhen strengthened by a solid core of continuing professional expertise.  

Or will our public spaces be taken over, entirely sponsored, enclosed? Will the “greater good” legacy lost? Are urban planners and architects truly required to take good public space into account?   

One can have wonderful initiatives, of course, but will the Royal Wild Flower meadows be enough? How much open space will be left in the Olympic Park a few years on?

There’s another aspect, too. A park is a place for conversation, for people to meet, to gather together, freely and for free. Surely that’s valuable too? Or does the human voice not need to be heard? Already when spaces become corporate, emptying when business is done, the life of that area disappears.

Right now, in Istanbul, a conflict rages. It was sparked, I read, by plans to build a shopping mall over the one remaining public park, although other problems are obviously involved. 

But that aspect of the Turkish protest did set me wondering about our own urban parks - the ones that aren’t the renowned parks of London. 

Do parks matter, still? Or could we lose that heritage by casual indifference and neglect?

And, maybe more happily, how's your own favourite park?

Penny Dolan.

Author of A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E. (Bloomsbury)

www.pennydolan.com