Parks are our natural health service -- let’s fight for them
WE USE our local park almost every d a y. Round the back of my house, it’s where my son is learning how to ride his bike. Never to be outdone, his barely toddling little sister is convinced she can now scoot (she can’t).
Even if it’s a quick 20-minute session, both always seem to sleep better on the days we get there.
If fresh air and exercise are what help keep us healthy, then our local parks are our natural health service. They are like a drop-in surgery, where you never need an appointment and you always leave feeling better.
Worrying figures revealed today by The Mail on Sunday suggest this is in danger. Three-quarters of local authorities say budget cuts are affecting parks and green spaces, with nearly all admitting they will reduce park services in the years ahead. Most alarming, one in five intends to sell off chunks of parkland, raising the prospect of swathes of green being turned into concrete.
The warning signs of a hastening decline are ever more obvious. You’ll have noticed overflowing bins or grass that hasn’t been cut in months, or dog foul or graffiti that hasn’t been cleaned up.
As ITV’s national editor, I’ve seen plenty of evidence that this is happening all over the country. In Preston, I’ve met walkers and runners unable to indulge their passion as their council lets paths disintegrate to craggy dangerous ruins, leaving hazard signs in place for months rather than maintain the greenery.
In Liverpool, Bristol and Kent I’ve seen parks become menacing no-go areas. While filming in Birmingham at dusk, a large park quickly filled with 20 aggressive lads who turned it into a place where no one would feel safe. Almost two- thirds of councils agree there’s a link between a poorly kept park and crime.
It is becoming clear that these examples are the thin end of the wedge. First, budget cuts lead to park rangers and wardens losing their jobs, and cafes and leisure centres closing. The park starts to generate less revenue. Councils then decide there’s no money to clear up dog foul or graffiti. Families increasingly stay away as gangs take their place.
And then the bulldozers start up. The London borough of Bexley has defied a residents’ campaign and built 30 houses and 30 flats on one of its parks. Devon’s Westward Ho! Village green park is about to make way for ten houses. In Stone, Staffordshire, a third of Tilling Drive Recreation Park is up for sale, with talk of a nursing home provider moving in.
It’s hard to think of a public policy problem that isn’t helped by parks. All roads lead to the park. According to research published in May, parks save the NHS more than £ 111 million a year and deliver £34 billion of health benefits, staving off dementia, dulling loneliness, improving memory, reducing obesity and averting type 2 diabetes.
Allowing parks to go into decline is the definition of a false economy. Take away the natural health service and you’ll pile costs on to the National Health Service.
If the triangle of greenery behind my home is a drop-in surgery for keeping fit, larger parks such as the 53 acres of Clissold Park a little further away are more like super- duper health clubs. The i ncredible perk? They’re free. Local kids who fire tennis balls about go on to compete nationally.
TO DO 1 0 k, I r un around it three times, nodding to other runners. Once, running after sunset I was locked in. I had to scale the railings and in the dark, a passing young man held out his arms for me to jump down. To a d a p t Margaret That c h e r ’s remark ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and… families’, we could retort: ‘ There’s no such thing as society, it’s the park.’
Like so many other wonderful pieces of infrastructure, our parks were established by the Victorians at the height of industrialisation. As patches of town like mine morphed from meadows into 19th Century metropolis, people worried that working families would lose green spaces in which to exercise and unwind.
My local Clissold Park, for instance, would have been turned into housing if hadn’t been for J o s e p h Beck, who in 1884 launched a campaign to raise £10 million in today’s money to buy the land. Even though he got cancer of the tongue and had half of it removed, he continued his crusade and won, giving us a deer park, an aviary, the lot.
Environment Secretary Michael Gove has talked about saving national parks, quoting Philip Larkin’s ‘lament for the erosion and destruction of our natural environment under the pressures of corporate greed’. In Larkin’s own words: ‘And that will be England gone… all that remains for us will be concrete and tyres.’
Indeed. The Government has to think fast about how parks are funded. Currently, there is no statutory requirement for councils to fund and maintain their parks. This must change.
We need laws forcing local authorities to ring- fence the money required to keep parks going. Environmental charity Keep Britain Tidy estimates that £30 per household a year would suffice. That seems a sensible place to start. There should also be a legal duty for all green spaces to be well-kept – and strict rules banning development on existing parkland. Many will find it shocking this isn’t already the case.
Parks will continue to hire themselves out for fairs and concerts. These profits, too, should be ring- fenced for the parks, and there should be time limits on how long a festival can trash a lawn.
Alternatively, we face dipping into our own pockets. Fundraising for Clissold Park in the 1880s saw modest and poor Victorians alike contribute subscriptions until the target was reached. When New York’s Central Park was spruced up in the 1970s, they asked all residents for a dollar.
About this time last year, my son and I brought home a haul of 60 conkers. He lined them up on the kitchen floor and we felt richer than Philip Green. It never occurred to me that anyone could charge for that simple pleasure.
Now the idea that you should have to pay every time you go to the park – or that it might disappear altogether – is becoming all too real. But if even a Victorian with a half a tongue could stop it, we can too.