Town Mouse
On returning to London town four years ago after twelve years of country living, I was struck by two changes.
One was that the buses were far more frequent. And the other was that the parks were far more beautiful than I remembered. They seem so well-kept. Most weekends now, I manage to get to Hyde Park, Holland Park or Richmond Park with the dog and experience a bit of rus in urbe, completely free.
I feel like an 18th-century gent as I promenade down the avenues. I cycle past the Serpentine Gallery for a meeting in Victoria and experience moments of pure bliss.
In a commercial world, where we are all weighed and numbered and planned and costed and algorithmed, to walk for free past lime trees and observe the gambolling squirrels – all oblivious to Brexit and the Bitcoin bubble – is a real tonic.
Parks are one of the great achievements of city life. According to a new book, Paths to the Past by archaeologist Francis Pryor, we have a visionary Victorian gardener, called Joseph Paxton, to thank for the modern park boom.
Paxton had designed the great glasshouses at Crystal Palace and was asked by right-thinking Liverpool burghers to design a park on 226 acres of marshy land. Birkenhead Park opened in 1847 and was, according to historian Travis Elborough, ‘an exercise in the pastoral’. There were nine lodges, a pagoda, a stone boathouse, a Romanstyle bandstand and rustic bridges crossing the man-made lakes.
This mid-19th-century outbreak of communal spirit was partly a reaction to the grinding down of human beings undertaken by the unprincipled capitalists and utilitarian mill-owners in the dark Satanic factories. The Victorian craze for the institution of public spaces also attempted to reverse the loss of common land which had been going on for the previous two centuries as various acts allowed formally communal space to be enclosed.
Twelve new parks were laid out in London between 1840 and 1852, after a public committee argued that the poor needed proper recreation as a ‘spring to industry’.
Victoria Park in Hackney came into use in 1845 – one contemporary guidebook writer believed it would do a great job of quelling class war: ‘No nobler monument exists of the kindly disposition which now generally prevails for ameliorating the condition of the operative classes, no surer antidote is found to the incendiary harangue, which would make the humble discontented with their governors, than Victoria Park.’
That is very true. When I am feeling discontented with my governors, I find that a stroll through shady groves can do wonders for the temperament.
Still, Sylvia Pankhurst later chose Victoria Park for her own incendiary harangues: she addressed anti-conscription meetings there.
Of course, parks go back before the 19th century (albeit they were privately owned then). Hyde Park was opened to the public in 1637 by its owner Charles I. Later that same century, Dryden coined the delightful phrase ‘park time’, to describe the idle hours spent drifting aimlessly through tree-lined avenues and admiring topiary.
The parks of old were often havens of illicit behaviour as well as healthful recreation. St James’s Park was a well-known resort for prostitutes, cut-throats, duellists and other morally questionable characters, as the diaries of Boswell and others tell us.
When crossing the park from the Mall, I often think of young bucks having their way with comely wenches up against a tree.
In the 18th century, Joseph Addison of the Spectator, in an early example of George Monbiot-style rewilding, led a revolt against excessive contrivance and artificiality in park design. He objected in particular to topiary: ‘I would rather look on a tree in all its luxuriance and diffusion of boughs and branches, than when it is… cut and trimmed into a mathematical figure.’
According to author Elborough, in A Walk in the Park, the move towards more natural-looking parks was partly conceived as an attack on the formal parterres of the French pleasure gardens. Such formality was the flipside of tyranny. We Brits wanted something wilder, more reflective of our liberal values; so picturesque ruins and winding paths replaced rectilinear flowerbeds. Parks are political.
A weekend visit to Richmond Park is another London treat. I grew up in Richmond and spent half my childhood in the park. So it holds happy memories of freedom and play.
Now it is a retreat from the hustle and bustle. But it has been sadly marred by the invasion of competitive cyclists. Each weekend, hordes of mainly male, Lycra-wearing Tour de France wannabes use the park as a racetrack, scaring toddlers, overtaking cars and tossing aside gel packs which are then consumed by unsuspecting deer.
So let us praise all the good men and women who have worked to maintain the urban parks of Blighty because they literally make life worth living.
As the privately wealthy increase their landholdings and put keep-out gates everywhere, we must remember that this land was made for you and me.