Britain Etc.

by Mark Easton

  It was rousing rhetoric, a poetic rallying cry: the ‘toiling and smoke-dried citizens’ of the ‘great Babylon’ denied even the opportunity to walk upon the ‘innocent lawns’ or ‘gather a cowslip from the grass’. The demand for access to green spaces was growing louder.

  Public parks were imbued with powerful symbolism as the massive social upheaval of industrialisation swept across Britain. Victorian romantics saw them as much more than a vital public health measure in overcrowded cities. They represented a heavenly idyll contrasting with the satanic mills of untrammelled capitalism. Denied access to God’s natural landscape, the poor would succumb to earthly temptation.

  It was at this point that what we now think of as the great British public park was conceived, complete with bandstand and duck pond, peacocks and perambulators. Among its chief architects was John Loudon, who had big ideas for the nation’s pleasure grounds. As well as the requisite turf, he envisaged ‘water, under certain circumstances (especially if there were no danger of it producing malaria), rocks, quarries, stones, wild places in imitation of heaths and caverns, grottoes, dells, dingles, ravines, hills, valleys, and other natural-looking scenes, with walks and roads, straight and winding, shady and open’.

  Loudon set the benchmark on 16 September 1840 with the spectacular opening of Derby Arboretum, the first public park in England, possibly the world. It is hard to imagine from the contemporary viewpoint of a neglected patch of green in some struggling post-industrial town just what excitement a new park could engender. For hundreds of years, ordinary workers had seen their limited access to grass gradually stolen from them; commons enclosed, fences erected, the threat of prosecution or summary justice should they dare to trespass on private lawns. Now, unexpectedly, the pendulum seemed to be swinging back the other way.

  Wealthy Derby mill owner Joseph Strutt had concluded that in order to gain the respect of the working classes and reform them from ‘their brutish behaviour and debasing pleasures’, they must be allowed to walk upon the lawn. He handed the deeds of his arboretum to the town council and inspired the biggest party in Derby’s history. ‘The balls and bands, the feasts and the fireworks, the dejeuners and dances, continued from Wednesday to Saturday,’ the local paper reported. Tradesmen closed their shops and Derby’s mental condition was described as ‘an effervescence of delirious delight, of rollicking rapture’.

  Suddenly, every self-respecting industrial town wanted one of these new civic parks and influential figures were recruited to the cause. The Duke of Devonshire, one of the richest and most powerful landowners in the country, agreed that his head gardener at Chatsworth, Joseph Paxton, could work on public parks for polluted mill towns and industrial centres in northern England and Scotland.

  The Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, son of a wealthy Lancastrian mill owner, donated some of his personal fortune to Manchester’s Committee for Public Walks, Gardens & Playgrounds, which spent seven years co-ordinating three new parks, each to open on the same day. To the sound of cannon fire and trumpets, 22 August 1846 saw tens of thousands of people stream into Peel Park, Queen’s Park and Philips Park, green spaces hailed as the clean lungs of the working city of Manchester.

  On Easter Monday the following year, the Paxton-designed Birkenhead Park on the Wirrall opened its gates. Again, tens of thousands came to mark the occasion and there were ‘rural sports’ freely and joyfully played on the open grass: a sack race, chase the pig with the soapy tail, a blindfold wheelbarrow race and, apparently, a grinning match through six horse collars — the ugliest to receive five shillings. In that moment, it appeared, the village green had been reclaimed.

  Among the crowds who thronged to Birkenhead over the next few years was the celebrated US landscape architect Frederick Olmstead. Impressed by what he saw, he took both the landscape features and the egalitarian principles of Birkenhead Park back across the Atlantic and incorporated them into US culture. His design for New York’s Central Park borrowed heavily from Paxton’s parks in northern England, but the journey to the Wirrall was to have an even more profound impact on American suburbia.

  The Riverside district of Chicago, laid out by Olmstead after his visit, was to become the model for suburban communities across the States. He set each house thirty feet from the road, with no dividing wall in between. Instead, the front lawns converged into a seamless river of green without obstruction or boundary. This was Olmstead’s and America’s homage to Britain’s anti-enclosure movement and to our community parks.

  Back in the UK, however, for all the rollicking rapture, there was also dark muttering — warnings that the brutish working classes could not be trusted to respect the lawns and gardens, and no good would come of such generosity. A letter in The Times revealed how, just as the working classes in the north of England were enjoying new access to green spaces, the Royal Parks in London were trying to evict the vulgar plebs. ‘Last Wednesday every decently dressed mechanic was turned out of Hyde Park,’ the epistle began, hinting at bubbling disquiet. ‘The warden in green said this was in accordance with new orders received from the ranger. It strikes me that these very green underlings are acting in a way, whether with or without authority, most conducive to encourage revolutionary principles, and I expect some day to hear of their getting a good ducking in the Serpentine. What is the use of this excessive exclusiveness with regard to parks which used to be considered public? It is enough to make any person’s blood boil.’

  With London still expanding rapidly, landowners around the capital continued the policy of enclosure, fencing and carving up traditional common land for housing. The developing commuter belt became a battleground over access to grass. In the spring of 1870, rioting erupted south of the Thames.

  In Wandsworth, hundreds of people armed with hatchets and pickaxes re-established a footpath enclosed by a Mr Costeker at Plough Green. ‘At each crashing of the fence there was a great hooting and hurrahing.’ At Plumstead Common ‘a party of women, armed with saws and hatchets, first commenced operations by sawing down a fence enclosing a meadow.’ Reports at the time spoke of ‘the lower class… resolved to test their rights’.

  When a golf club in Camberwell enclosed a popular beauty spot, One Tree Hill, in 1896 it provoked a wave of anger. The erection of a six-foot fence around immaculately trimmed greens for the exclusive benefit of the well-to-do members of a private club unleashed the pent-up fury of hundreds of years of class struggle to walk upon the grass.

  On a Sunday in October, a crowd of 15,000 people assembled close to the hill and began attacking the fence. Police reinforcements were summoned and calm was, eventually, restored. But a week later the protestors returned in far greater numbers. Some reports said that 100,000 people crowded around the golf club that day with 500 foot and mounted police lined up to protect the fence. ‘Stone throwing was freely indulged in, and the police were more than once hit.’ One officer was badly wounded as the battle intensified. ‘Rushes on the part of the roughs were quickly responded to by charges of the police, when mounted police and fleeing public were mingled in what, at times, appeared to be inextricable confusion.’

  However, as the Victorian era drew to a close, from the inextricable confusion of urban development and industrialisation emerged a country fanatical about grass: tennis courts, croquet lawns, bowling greens, golf courses, football pitches, cricket squares. The invention of the mower had seen the lawn escape over the high hedges of England’s great estates and into the gardens of a million humble suburban homes. Urban planners had become convinced of the need for green spaces and municipal authorities vied to recruit the finest lawn-makers for their locality.

  The last decade of the nineteenth century saw a thousand acres of town gardens and ornamental grounds open in London alone. The Garden City movement of Ebenezer Howard revisited some of Loudon’s ideas, creating new towns built around concentric circles of green. The National Trust was born, with a mission to protect ‘the public interest in open spaces’. The trust would go o
n to care for more than 600,000 acres of land ‘for the benefit of the nation’.

  It appeared the long and bloody fight for the right of all to walk upon the green grass had been won. But then it all started to go backwards again. It was as though we gradually but inexorably lost our memory of the struggle we had been through, a communal dementia in which hundreds of years of campaigning and fighting was forgotten.

  Perhaps Britain had new battles to win; the Second World War saw parks, commons and greens ploughed up for food production. In the 1950s, cash-strapped local authorities attempted to restore municipal gardens, but they couldn’t finish the job. The 1960s was a decade with eyes on a concrete future rather than nostalgia for some organic past. (It was also a time when a passion for grass meant something entirely different.) The 1970s and 80s were an economic roller-coaster ride in which any remaining park keepers found themselves and their peaked caps flung out at the first hint of danger.

  Which led us to the 1990s, when my professional wandering led me to countless residential parks to take the civic temperature. What struck me was just how deserted these places felt. Where was everybody? The answer was indoors.

  If ‘toiling and smoke-dried citizens’ wished to take a little exercise, they drove to the breezeblock leisure centre, a development constructed and maintained with the money that used to be spent on the local park. If they wanted to find some ‘amusement, recreation, entertainment, and instruction’, they headed for the shopping mall, with its artificial trees and canned muzac. The commercial had replaced the civic. Public space had been abandoned in favour of the private sphere.

  When plans were revealed to build on the last remaining patch of public grass in central Washington in north-east England, a few local residents launched a campaign to try to save it. They had watched how developers had transformed their town, effectively enclosing previously public areas within The Galleries shopping centre. In April 1998, a small group began setting up their stall in the mall hoping to collect signatures for a petition but, in a powerful reflection of what had already been lost, they were refused permission by the shopping centre owners. Mary Appleby, Pamela Beresford and Robert Duggan went to the European Court of Human Rights to argue that they were being denied their freedom of expression, but the judges disagreed. Washington’s proud civic centre was now private retail space. Once more, rich traders would decree who could walk on the grass.

  An emergent environmentalist movement saw the neglect of green spaces and the privatisation of town centres as a new policy of enclosure that needed to be challenged. The political activist George Monbiot, writing in the Guardian, demanded citizens ‘reassert our rights to common spaces’ and ‘where necessary wrest them back from the hands of the developers’. The call to arms attracted a broad range of recruits: hippies and anarchists; eco-warriors and anti-capitalists. They were a noisy, diverse and angry crowd with often contradictory and pretty unrealistic global ambitions. The Daily Mail described the coalition of activists as ‘a grouping of organisations from Lesbian Avengers to cloaked members of the Druid Clan of Dana’.

  Up in the trees of a public park in Derby in 1998, close to the scenes of rollicking rapture a century-and-half before, activists built tree houses in an attempt to thwart developers who wanted to build a road and a roundabout. But such protests were fringe affairs lacking broad popular support. Far from wanting to see the end of capitalism, most people preferred the air-conditioned comfort of the private shopping mall to the intimidating atmosphere of the public park.

  It fell to a committee of MPs in 1999 to take stock. ‘We are shocked at the weight of evidence, far beyond our expectations, about the extent of the problems parks have faced in the last thirty years,’ their report concluded. ‘It is clear that if nothing is done many of them will become albatrosses around the necks of local authorities. Un-used, derelict havens for crime and vandalism, it would be better to close them and re-use the land than to leave them to decay further.’

  Created as a refuge, the public park had become a no-go area. One witness told the MPs that the parks could not be made safe by ‘two men in a rundown vehicle and an Alsatian dog driving through every day at four o’clock. The kids went at five to four and came back at five past four and carried on burning.’ The traditional park keeper, if one existed, was an object of ridicule. Local youths began to see the (often elderly) ‘Parky’ as impotent and laughable.

  It is a rule of contemporary British politics that when ministers discover they have neglected some vital aspect of government they announce the creation of a ‘taskforce’. The word has a sense of urgency and military efficiency. So it was that in January 2001 the Urban Green Spaces Taskforce was established. There was much political discussion about urban renaissance amid growing anxiety about antisocial behaviour. Focus groups kept coming up with the same three words to describe what the public wanted: cleaner, greener and safer communities. In short, they needed their park back. They wanted to walk on the grass again. ‘Cleaner, Greener, Safer’ became the mantra of Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who told Parliament that ‘litter, graffiti, fly-tipping, abandoned cars, dog fouling, the loss of play areas or footpaths, for many people is the top public service priority.’ He said that public spaces were a barometer of a community, and successful neighbourhoods were characterised by parks and open spaces that local people were proud of and where they wanted to spend their time.

  The government knew, however, that bunging a bit of cash at the problem might make sense in a time of relative plenty, but a good lawn needs to be cared for during hard frosts and baking sun. ‘Central government expects local green space managers to make the case for green space expenditure against other pressing priorities,’ Mr Prescott helpfully announced. ‘Otherwise there is the danger that when budgets are tight, the case for green space will not be made effectively, will slip down the local priority list and decline will set in again.’

  Standing on untended grass, among the litter and dog mess of a British sink estate, I survey the scene. Budgets are tight and some regard spending on parks, pitches and playgrounds as an indulgence in austere times. But hundreds of years of struggle should not be dismissed lightly. If a society is functioning well, the grass will tell you.

  H is for Happiness

  If you had walked into my family’s sitting room in 1969, you would have seen a piece of furniture designed to look like a small mahogany drinks cabinet. In fact, when you folded back the little doors, it revealed itself as a television set. The object encapsulated my parents’ wary relationship with modernity. They would rather pretend to their friends they had bottles of alcohol stashed in the house than a TV.

  For me, though, the wooden doors opened onto a glorious future — my destiny. On the black and white screen inside the box I watched a man step foot onto the moon and, with that one small step, confidently assumed humankind was striding along a conveyor belt to a better and better world. Adventure and discovery would bring flying cars, everlasting gobstoppers and answers to every question — the definition of ‘progress’ to an optimistic 10-year-old boy.

  More than four decades on and I am still waiting. Not for flying cars and everlasting gobstoppers, I gave up on them years ago. But for an answer to one question: how should we define progress? It is a puzzle that haunts our contemporary politics: the Prime Minister has ordered official statisticians to come up with a way to measure levels of well-being in Britain, initiating a debate as to what exactly social progress looks like.

  But David Cameron is following a well-worn path. It is a mystery that has been bugging people for at least two-and-a-half thousand years, ever since Confucius in ancient China, Plato in ancient Greece and the Gautama Buddha in ancient India each tried to define it. For all of them, ‘progress’ had an ethical or spiritual dimension. It was a process of development leading to greater contentment, fulfilment and happiness in society — the good life, the ideal state, nirvana.

  The first European voices to challenge the
notion that human advancement was a religious or spiritual journey were probably heard in the fourteenth century. Renaissance thinkers began to ask whether progress might also be linked to a better understanding of science and appreciation of culture, that there was a human as well as a divine element to it.

  This thought was taken up by the philosopher Sir Francis Bacon in his novel of 1624, New Atlantis, in which he introduced readers to the perfect society of Bensalem, a utopia achieved entirely through learning, experiment and discovery. It might not sound like much of a blockbuster plot, but in the seventeenth century this was heady stuff. The book inspired the foundation of the Invisible College, a group of a dozen eminent scientists which later became the Royal Society, one of the world’s most respected scientific institutions to this day.

  There was a conflict between a church that saw progress in terms of a journey towards individual Christian salvation and scientists who argued that humanity’s destiny lay in its own hands by the acquisition of knowledge and application of rational thought. In the spring of 1776, the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham published an anonymous pamphlet entitled ‘A Fragment on Government’, in which he argued, ‘It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.’ He maintained that the purpose or ‘utility’ of every government action should be ‘to add to the happiness of the community’. It was a vision that borrowed heavily on the ideas of ancient Greece, but the problem remained as it had for thousands of years: how to measure such progress?