Our parks are a priceless asset to us all

FIRST they concreted over the school playing fields. Now the parks of Britain are in danger. Just as science discovers for certain that exercise is the key to health, greedy developers and lazy, mean town halls threaten to destroy the only places where most of us can find room to run and walk.

Just as a noisy, restless, overcrowded world begins to yearn more than ever for shade, peace, clean air and space, these priceless things start to vanish.

In an age of flat-dwelling, disappearing front gardens and shrinking back gardens, the glorious Victorian legacy of municipal parks has never been more precious or more needed.

Astonishingly, local authorities are under no obligation to maintain the parks they have inherited from wiser forebears. This leaves them free to pursue the flashy vanity projects and politically correct activities they love so much, at the expense of green space, flower beds and playgrounds.

The most shocking example of this is Middlesbrough’s refusal to pay £3,000 a year for a warden to open a padlocked park and play area – while it managed to find £32,000 to pay for local notables to guzzle costly food and wine.

But there are hundreds of less outrageous examples of the same thing. Unloved, short of gardeners, no longer patrolled by the keepers who used to ensure order and safety, parks decline.

Beneath neglected trees, weeds choke paths and flowerbeds. Drug-dealers and petty criminals begin to feel at home, while parents and children are afraid to enter. Yet more territory is ceded to vandals, litter louts and lawbreakers.

And so the councils involved find it ever easier to lop off pieces of these decaying parks, pointing out truthfully that the public make little use of them, and hand them over to developers. As The Mail on Sunday’s special report so graphically demonstrates today, this is a process that is frighteningly well-advanced. One in five local authorities plans to raise money by selling off parkland in the next three years. One in three has already done so.

This is a terrible mistake. Once lost, this precious space will be gone for good. Town halls are notorious for falling for disastrous fashions that look foolish 20 years later, from tower blocks to inner ring-roads. This particular folly looks stupid already.

Local authorities themselves must listen to the protests against their neglect of parks, then find the money to keep them safe and clean. They must also stop selling them off. But central government should act to make the provision of permanent, inviolable green space, well maintained and conserved, an absolute duty. It is a key part of our national health.