Parks should be our last oases of freedom even if the world outside is different
We usually play tennis in the park once or twice at weekends, but over the past couple of weeks, since the change in everybody’s circumstances, we’ve been playing every day – until today that is.
Now the tennis courts have been closed, apparently, because of the risk of infection from the handles on the gate.
So instead we made a number of circuits on our bikes around the park – dodging the runners, the power-walkers, the dog walkers, and their dogs, the children on scooters, the other cyclists. It was only 7.15am.
I doubt the park had ever been so busy quite so early. But if nothing else, the virus has inspired a sudden, urgent awareness of our own mortality, and the need to keep fit.
Here were people who had dug out gym shoes long forgotten at the back of the cupboard, labouring breathlessly around the circuit; people wobbling uncertainly on newly acquired bicycles.
Nobody was congregating in groups; nobody was breaking the rules. Even eye contact seemed to be out of the question – a reflex memory from the train or Tube journey they would normally have been taking, perhaps.
The birds were singing; the sky was blue. It felt good – very good – to be alive.
Who does not love a park? There are an estimated 27,000 public parks in Britain. They are one of the greatest gifts the Victorians left us – what Henry James called “an ornament not elsewhere to be matched”.
The municipal authorities, campaigners and wealthy benefactors who created and endowed them were inspired by the spirit of civic virtue for the common good.
Typical was a meeting at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in 1844, where an appeal was made for “every woman who finds her children’s sport restricted to the smallness of her house, and their health deteriorated by continual habitation of crowded streets, and who loves her offspring and wishes them to live” to “move herself, and induce her husband to move”, in support of the establishment of free public parks.
The principles were established. Parks as a place for city dwellers to escape, to roam, to play, to engage with such nature as they have to offer; to sit and bask in the sun, or under the shade of a spreading tree doing nothing in particular; parks, with their wide avenues, bridle paths, cultivated gardens, boating lakes, the cafés (now closed) and the children’s playground (they’re closed too); a place where all are equal, and may mingle – albeit now with restrictions. They are the lungs of the city: good for our bodies, our minds and our spirits.
I walked back through at lunchtime, carrying the shopping.
Curiously, there were fewer people than earlier in the day, and the mood was of peaceful serenity.
The power-walkers had been replaced by the amblers. There were mothers pushing baby chairs. A man in jogging clothes sitting in splendid isolation on the grass, amid a riot of daffodils, resting momentarily before jogging on.
A girl was seated in the lotus position on a picnic table. She was wearing a T-shirt that said “love wins”. We all hope it does.
We are undergoing a process of increasing limitations by degree. But it seems to me imperative that parks should remain open, for our mental as well as our physical well-being – essential in that case that we must all now observe the new social rituals of veering away if someone seems to be passing by too closely, of hailing friends, if we see them, from a safe distance – of following the rules, in the knowledge that the park is the one remaining oasis of freedom, one precious time a day, that could yet be taken from us if we don’t behave ourselves – as much as “behaving ourselves” may stick in the craw.
I was reminded of walking in another park in another city, on a balmy spring evening. A park as large as Hyde Park in London or Central Park in New York.
In one area groups of the middleaged and elderly were practising exercises, swinging their arms and bending their knees in perfect synchronicity, to the accompaniment of music wafting from a public address system.
In another area, on a makeshift stage, a small troupe of players were performing scenes from an opera. People cycled by, children laughed and screamed, young lovers sat on benches holding hands.
It was vibrantly, thrillingly alive. A perfect model of harmony, happiness and good health, and of all that a park should be.
It felt as if it could last forever. The city was Wuhan.
‘[Parks] are the lungs of the city: good for our bodies, our minds and our spirits’