Such, such were the joys
When we all, girls and boys,
In our youth-time were seen
On the echoing green.
William Blake
‘WITHOUT COMMON LAND no social system can survive,’ wrote the architectural historian Christopher Alexander in 1997, a prescient warning at a time when the privatisation of public assets was gaining increased traction as the new political common sense. More recently, in July 2016, a House of Commons Select Committee on ‘The Future of Public Parks’ began public consultation by asking ‘what the advantages and disadvantages are of other management models, such as privatisation, outsourcing or mutualisation.’
What have voters done to deserve this resurgent ideological attack on the public realm? Parks are almost the last symbols of common land rights left in towns and cities, and perhaps this is why they attract so much ideological opprobrium from free-market economists, for whom the commons is now an antiquated and outdated ethical sphere.
Having lived close to Clissold Park in Hackney for nearly fifty years, I know only too well how much the park’s majestic chestnut and plane trees, wide skies and open horizons, undulating grassland, ornamental lakes and gardens – along with the regular passeggiata of familiar and unfamiliar faces – have provided a source of pleasure and refuge to the many who use it, often daily. As with the woodland glade in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, parks are places of enchantment from which visitors emerge refreshed, changed or renewed.
For the three million visitors it attracts each year, Clissold Park is one of the larger public open spaces in this part of London, and has been so for more than a hundred years, but its future is once again threatened. This is because the provision of public parks remains a ‘non-statutory’ service, which means municipal authorities are not required to provide them if they feel they can’t afford to, and in an ‘age of austerity’ non-statutory provision is the first to suffer, as is now happening.
Cuts to parks budgets are biting deeply across the UK, according to the Heritage Lottery Fund’s report, State of UK Public Parks 2016. While more popular than ever – with over 90 per cent of families with children under five and 57 per cent of all adults using them regularly – parks services across the country are being outsourced to community groups or their management, and maintenance handed over to private contractors in order to save money. In 2014 Liverpool City Council, for example, announced that over the following three years its annual £10 million parks budget would be cut by 50 per cent. Many other councils have announced similar levels of reduced funding. ‘Parks take a long time to fall apart,’ says Dave Morris, chair of the National Federation of Parks and Green Spaces, adding that ‘it’s not immediately noticeable, like a library closing’. But over time the effects are just as socially (and environmentally) disastrous. Sooner or later there is a danger that many city parks will take on the character of the bleak, deserted grasslands of those edgeland prairies, where only dog walkers, footballers and joy-riders venture.
The amount of public parkland in any town or city is an accident of history: some places have prodigious amounts of open green space, while others have just pockets. To complicate matters, there are distinct typologies of urban parkland, ranging from the ornamental garden to the prestigious civic park, and from the garden square to the public commons or recreation ground. Allotments, canal towpaths, closed burial grounds, memorial gardens, bowling greens and many other serendipitous green spaces add to the urban mix. Each has its own history and customary ‘rules of engagement’, which are often implicitly understood by their users, occasionally reinforced by local by-laws. These typological distinctions are fascinating, each bringing with it rich historic associations, not just with aesthetic issues, but also differences in their respective ‘moral economies’. A park is never simply just a green space, but an ever-changing mise-en-scène of social theatre.
Clissold Park itself is a classic hortus conclusus, a former enclosed private house and grounds, that over time has mutated into a modern city park, a successful hybrid of the Renaissance ‘public garden’ and the historic recreational space of the English commons, where markets are held, sports played, and funfairs and travelling circuses encamp for a short while. It is intriguing how these historic typologies of cultivated and open land have been commandeered and re-purposed in recent times by the internet with its ‘walled gardens’ and ‘creative commons’.
The park and its mansion, Clissold House (Grade II-listed), originated as a family estate in the 1790s, under the ownership of a Quaker banker, Jonathan Hoare. After several changes of ownership during the nineteenth century, in the 1880s the 53-acre estate ended up in the hands of the Church Commissioners, who proposed selling the site for development. A vociferous and successful public campaign led to its purchase by the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1886, and it was opened as a public park by the newly formed London County Council (LCC) on 24 July 1889. It remained with the elected London authority until 1986 when, with the abolition of the Greater London Council (GLC), house and park were transferred to Hackney Borough Council, in whose large and richly variegated portfolio of land holdings it now rests.
For some years after Hackney Council – like many other London boroughs to which the former GLC parks were transferred by government diktat – struggled to maintain Clissold Park adequately. This was for reasons of cost as well as a lack of management expertise necessary to maintain such large historic parks and their built heritage. In the 1980s anxieties about the decline of the park and mansion spurred the formation of a voluntary user group, Clissold Park User Group (CPUG). This grew in size and expertise over time, and, though starting from a fairly adversarial relationship with the local authority, now works closely with council officers. Initially this was for one reason only: the arrival of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s urban parks spending programme in 1996. Whatever one’s reservations about the morality of using lotteries to underwrite public amenities – and I certainly have them – there is no doubt that the HLF parks programme, which has now provided more than £800 million to UK parks over the past twenty years, has transformed many out of recognition, and provided the greatest renewal of parks seen in Britain for more than half a century.
A grant of £4.5 million to Clissold Park in 2008, matched by £4.1 million from council funds, restored the mansion to a pristine condition, and refurbished every aspect of the park and its hydrological features, together with new tennis courts and extensive play provision for young children and sports enthusiasts. The grant came with significant conditions, notably that the park and mansion required their own dedicated management team, together with on-site gardening staff, a business plan for the house, and an educational programme for working with local schools. The enhanced status that Hackney’s parks service now enjoys as a result of the HLF programme has put its management team back on the top table in the council hierarchy – but for how much longer?
Many other city parks also have their origins in large private family estates acquired by municipal authorities in the late-Victorian era. In the history of modern cities it is the moment when the new civic gospel and the natural world came together, and in doing so created a new landscape form that has over the past hundred years been replicated across the world. The architect Terry Farrell has said that while Britain imported most of its ideas on city form and townscape from Europe and beyond, its true claim to fame is that it gave the world the public park.
The Victorian concern with formality in public life meant that the early parks were designed and managed as spaces of moral uplift and social regulation, though over time such regimes fell out of step with changing social mores. It was Sunday every day in the Victorian park: best clothes and best behaviour. Plants and trees were labelled for public edification in English and Latin; children’s free play was strictly restricted to one small area, if allowed at all, and informal sports were prohibited.
Times changed, and parks had to change accordingly. Thus, when the veteran municipal socialist George Lansbury was given the minor Cabinet post of Commissioner of Works in the 1929 Labour government – he had been deliberately sidelined by Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald, who loathed him – Lansbury took to the job with gusto. He ended up as the only minister of that short-lived government to acquit himself with an enhanced political reputation, notably through his commitment to widening access to public parks. ‘Railings were pulled down, shelters for parents put up, paddling and swimming pools for children constructed, play and recreational equipment installed in the parks over which he had jurisdiction,’ wrote his biographer, Bob Holman. ‘Mixed bathing was allowed in the Serpentine and Hyde Park was revamped as “Lansbury’s Lido”. His aim was to make the parks attractive to and open to families of all kinds – and he succeeded.’
Other cities followed Lansbury. During the 1930s across Britain the Victorian park underwent a process of greater democratisation in design and amenity. This was sufficiently impressive to attract the praise of admiring observers from abroad, such as the eminent Danish architect, Steen Eiler Rasmussen, who devoted five chapters of his seminal 1937 work on London architecture, London: The Unique City, to praising the lively conviviality of London’s parks, as did the great Dutch historian and philosopher of play, Johan Huizinga, in his 1938 study Homo Ludens.
Those new public parks designed from scratch, rather than adapted from existing estates, were usually part of the development of the wealthier housing districts and suburbs, and were sometimes regarded de facto as a private amenity for those living in properties overlooking or adjoining them, as had been the case with the more prestigious London parks. Conflicts between residents immediately fringing the grander parks, and users from other parts of the city, soon emerged (and still rumble beneath the surface in many places even today).
Other changes resulted during both world wars, when large areas of urban parkland were transformed into allotments for food-growing, a trend re-emerging today as community groups request permission to convert under-used parkland into productive use. For some years now the organisation Growing Communities has had its own smallholding in Clissold Park, supplying local farmers’ markets and cafés with salads and herbs, while training volunteers in horticultural skills. During the Second World War people were encouraged to take advantage of ‘Holidays at Home’ schemes, eschewing travel abroad or elsewhere in Britain in favour of using local parks, where programmes of events and activities were provided to help sustain civilian morale.
Parks have their fair-weather users, as well as hardened regulars. In the summer months Clissold Park provides a popular place for picnics, informal sports, funfairs, Turkish, Kurdish and Afro-Caribbean festivals, along with a deer park and animal enclosures to visit, and swans, ducks and geese to admire on the lakes. Meanwhile people queue to be photographed against the brilliant floral displays for wedding and family photographs. There are free summer music concerts in the formal gardens, play schemes for children and young people, the butterfly tunnel is opened and one of the last surviving municipal paddling pools comes into its own.
T’ai chi, yoga, martial arts, meditation, circus skills and tightrope walking can all be seen being practised daily, alongside impromptu football games and organised matches on marked-out pitches. It is estimated that more than 500 people use Clissold Park regularly for jogging. Local surgeries promote organised ‘health walks’ in the park, now popular among older people from all of Stoke Newington’s diverse communities, and the ‘One O’Clock Club’, a legacy from the post-war London County Council that installed them in all of its major parks, has provided indoor and outdoor play facilities for the under-fives for many years, as well as a much-needed meeting place for isolated parents and carers. Thanks to Lottery funding there is now a popular ‘wheels park’ for skate-boarders and riders of BMX bikes. No other public amenity in this densely populated area offers such a rich variety of attractions and activities every day of the year, and for free. Hence the 3 million visits each year.
Among the hardened regulars out in all weathers are dog owners and professional dog-walkers. The growing number of dogs in the park is a divisive issue locally, though owners are always keen to remind other park users that they are out in all hours of daylight and often the first to spot or report anything untoward. Nevertheless, the fact that so many dogs run freely is a problem for the Orthodox Jewish and Muslim visitors who use the park and share a common aversion to dogs as human familiars. This is where parks draw on the legacy of the commons, as places where conflicting needs and interests – and there are many – have to be negotiated. Apart from conflicts about dogs in the park, there are cyclists competing with pedestrians on the footpaths, players of team sports in conflict with those looking for peace and quiet, and festival organisers whose (strictly rationed) events cause concern for residents living nearby. Regular public meetings of the park-user group provide a mediating forum for trying to resolve such conflicts, and may indeed be one of the voluntary forum’s principal functions.
This was the theme of an article by the American journalist Michael Goldfarb in the New York Times some time ago, when he wrote admiringly about the park he found himself living close by. ‘In a world splitting at the seams, Clissold Park is like a dream,’ he wrote. ‘Some of the most intractable conflicts in the world seem to have been resolved – or at least temporarily ignored. Kurds and Turks, Jews and Muslims, working-class and middle-class people (this is Britain) all co-exist, enjoying the lawns, the deer park, the ponds, the rose garden and the wading pool.’
Not all use is negotiable, especially after dark. Despite the fact that the park is locked at night, its after-hours use increases in the summer months: homeless people sleep there, and it provides a setting for sexual encounters and drinking schools. To my knowledge at least two people have hanged themselves from the trees, to be discovered by distressed park staff the next morning. Some years ago it was also the scene of a frenzied stabbing attack on a woman jogger after dark, which proved serious but not fatal. The morning after the police closed the park for a fortnight, and every gate was sealed and permanently guarded. An air of gloom settled upon the immediate neighbourhood. On the Sunday after re-opening the minister of the nearby Anglican church organised a carol-singing procession through the park, led by a professional jazz trumpet-player. It was a large, ecumenical gathering in which several hundred people processed along every park footpath and avenue, holding candles and lamps, singing. With this largely spontaneous ritual the park was reclaimed from its enforced sleep.
Despite such rare and shocking events the park remains overwhelmingly a sanctuary and safe haven. At its busiest it is used by thousands of people in the course of a day without any formal policing, in sharp contrast to many other public spaces in the city which now seem to swarm with private security guards. For me, this attests to the moral economy of traditional park culture, which acts to temper behaviour in the interests of the wider public comity, providing the strongest argument as to why they are safer in public rather than private hands. While conflicting uses are mostly resolved informally, the elected local authority retains the power to arbitrate on any major conflicts of use within the park, possessing as it does, in my opinion, a democratic legitimacy that a privatised or outsourced park would lack.
Parks also serve as proxy memorial gardens, and in some towns in recent years this has reached critical proportions, especially where sites of burial or cremation are located some distance away. A handful of local authorities have embargoed the installation of further park memorial benches, after complaints that their parks were acquiring the ambience of remembrance gardens. Some years ago the anthropologist Leonie Kellaher and I interviewed a number of park managers on the ways in which parks were increasingly being used for these purposes. Apart from dedicated benches and memorial trees, we were told of people surreptitiously interring ashes in areas previously favoured by the deceased. Furthermore, many of the trees planted without permission were of an inappropriate species, planted at the wrong time of year, dying soon after.
As a result, many local authorities now ask that those wishing to dedicate a tree to the memory of a loved one sponsor a species already designated as part of the park’s long-term planting programme. They are also asked to forgo individual memorial plaques, which, it is felt, compromise the communal aesthetic of the public park or garden, and the unanchored, amorphous spirit of this rus in urbs. A park can be a place of memory without words.
What gives parks this privileged status as one of the few remaining ‘sacred spaces’ in the modern urban landscape? Primarily there is a perceived connection to a pre-existent and enduring natural world – tenuous though the municipal park version of ‘nature’ may be – and thus with more seasonal rhythms of life, increasingly distinct from the digital timetable of the 24-hour city. This may be especially important for people who have come from rural cultures and who retain a strong pull to being outdoors whenever possible. And while the seemingly immutable world of Clissold Park has nevertheless witnessed enormous changes at its borders – the Georgians, Victorians and Edwardians have come and gone, tower blocks have risen at its perimeter, been demolished, and today rise again – it remains for many a still centre in an otherwise fast-turning world.
Finally, of course, there is the crucial factor of the weather. ‘Weather is the chief content of gardens,’ wrote the idiosyncratic artist and landscape designer Ian Hamilton Finlay, ‘yet it is the one thing in them over which the gardener has no control.’ The same is patently true of the sensual au plein air world of the public park, which can possess a crowded festive air in the heat of a summer’s afternoon, but at dusk on a winter’s day can exude an other-worldly melancholy.
The year 2016 commemorated the 500th-anniversary year of the publication of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, and there has been much discussion as to where any residual utopian impulses or visions in the world might still be found today. Inequality is on the rise, and London’s socially mixed communities are under continuing pressure from ‘the invisible hand’ of the housing market to segment even further into discrete enclaves of wealth and lifestyle. Yet parks remain among the last places in the city where all users are equal, and preferential terms of access or treatment cannot be purchased or parlayed. These outbreaks of arcadia hark back to ancient commons rights, and continue to embody the spirit of Blake’s idyll of the echoing green: a rare place of enchantment open to all.
G. F. Chadwick, The Park and the Town: Public Landscapes in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Architectural Press, 1966.
Hazel Conway, People’s Parks: the Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
Travis Elborough, A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, Jonathan Cape, 2016.
Gareth Evans & Di Robson (editors), Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and Its Meanings, ArtEvents, 2010.
Liz Greenhalgh & Ken Worpole, Park Life: Urban Parks & Social Renewal, Comedia & Demos, 1995.
Heritage Lottery Fund, State of UK Public Parks 2016, HLF, 2016.
Leonie Kellaher & Ken Worpole, ‘Bringing the Dead Back Home: Urban Public Spaces as Sites for New Patterns of Mourning & Memorialisation’, in Deathscapes, edited by Avril Maddrell & James D. Sidaway, Ashgate, 2010.
Margaret Willes, The Gardens of the British Working Class, Yale University Press, 2014.