Stuart Maconie

It shouldn’t have taken Covid to show that our city and town parks are everyday essentials, rather than luxuries…

O-ONE KNOWS WHO first called the Beatles ‘The Fab Four’, or who designated Old Trafford ‘the Theatre of Dreams’ or who was the creator of any number of phrases which combine romantic observations with marketing speak. Someone with an eye for a slick phrase now lost to posterity coined them at some point back in the day.

About two centuries back in the day, a smart cookie with a neat turn of phrase first described parks as ‘the lungs of a city’. In a world where cities were often filthy, polluted and overcrowded, it quickly stuck, and it resonates still. In fact it never rang truer than the spring of 2020, with the world trapped indoors and clinging to those sacred hours of permitted exercise.

Parks have come into their own since everything changed. Wisely kept open on the advice of actual scientists, they soon became a godsend for those of us without gardens or easy access to the countryside, which for several months was verboten anyway.

For all of us, but perhaps especially for families with kids twenty storeys up, or living over shops, these tracts of greenery were vital.

Three months into lockdown, Elle magazine ran a piece titled Are Parks the New Nightclubs? The answer, of course, is a pretty definitive ‘no’. But full marks for effort, and I naturally felt the pain of the struggling columnist. Bereft of the usual round of seasonal fun – what shoes to wear to a cocktail party, ten new ways with guacamole etc – it was a game try at how to use parks as a kind of groovy recreational space in which to flirt, dance and snog.

In truth, like most urban kids, that’s how I used them throughout my teenage years anyway: a place to hang out through the hot summer afternoons and long, cool evenings.

But in recent months we’ve seen that they are many things to many people: nightclub (apparently), gym, school and, most importantly, a little piece of the countryside at the bottom of the street.

NLast week I went ghyll scrambling for the first time, in Roughton Gill, North Lakes. I thought of the men who worked the old remote mine here and the tough lives they led. Later, in a Caldbeck churchyard, I chanced upon the Roughton Stone, a semicircular whetstone that must have sharpened a thousand pickaxes. Reminders of the ancient industries of Lakeland. Hear Stuart on Radcliffe and Maconie, BBC 6 Music, weekends, 7am to 10am.

I spend a whole chapter of my latest book talking about the value and benefits of public parks and railing against the recent trend, in parks as in everything, towards privatisation, monetisation and commercialisation. Like so much else in our public realm, parks have been cut to the bone. Eighty-six per cent of park managers say their budgets have been slashed. When the authorities in charge of Liverpool’s famous Sefton Park wanted to sell off eleven acres to housing developers, the outcry was swift, and it was led by Scouse-born Sex and the City actress Kim Cattrall. According to a report by Fields in Trust titled Revaluing Parks and Green Spaces, the mental and physical health benefits of parks save the NHS about £111 million a year. In order to the meet the same level of life satisfaction such places bring, each of us in Britain would have to spend a grand each year. Multiply that by the adult population, and parks generate more than £34 billion of benefits.

Getting someone in power to listen to this, though, was nearly impossible, until the world turned upside down and we started to realise that the things we’d devalued for years, things like open spaces and health care and parks and gardens and museums and galleries, were not just fripperies but essentials.

I’m not the moist-eyed optimist and romantic some are about a recalibration of life and priorities when this is over, about a changed world of harmony, community and decently funded state provision. But I do know this. Last month the government said it would contribute millions to fund Manchester’s first city-centre park in 100 years, as part of a series of investments in outdoor spaces in response to this crisis. A city-centre park in Leeds is also among the plans to receive funding from the scheme, as is a landscaped “pocket park” in Sheffield city centre.

It’s a shame that it has taken this virus to make us realise it, but when we emerge, we’ll all breathe easier thanks to those green lungs in our cities.