I live in the basement flat of a council owned Victorian town house on a busy road in South London. I never realised it at the time but it’s all I could have wished for growing up. I’m privileged to be easy walking distance of three excellent parks (Burgess, Myatt’s Fields and Kennington). In the past, around the time the house was built, I would have perhaps been even more fortunate to be in strolling distance of the Royal Surrey Gardens, the Royal Flora Pleasure Gardens (where the Wyndham and Coomber Estates are now in Camberwell) and, a bit more of a hike, or eight stops on the 185 omnibus, the famous Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.
The site of those remain (at Spring Gardens) as does the residue of the old Surrey Gardens at Pasley Park though both had gone by 1860 and there is no trace of the Flora Pleasure Gardens which closed in 1864. Kennington Park would’ve recently opened, though it existed as Kennington Common long before, and it would be a few decades before Myatt’s Fields Park in 1889 and over a century till Burgess did. In short London open spaces change use, disappear and some, like Stockwell Green, are almost entirely forgotten.
Improvements to local parks and open spaces are amongst the best changes of my three decades in London. I can understand how for some people the loss of 'edginess' in the metropolis' open spaces is to be lamented, as for many are the gated money-spinning festivals some play temporary hosts to. However, at heart, they remain multi-functional open places that meet so many of the needs of the modern, and for that matter, older city. As founder of the National Trust Octavia Hill said in the late 19th century.
‘We need places to sit in, places to play in, places to stroll in, and places to spend a day in.
Parks are taken to some extent for granted, part of a city’s DNA but it is important to remember that most of the (relatively) recently created spaces today are acts of political will, driven by recognised need or long-term policy. This is true of large-scale developments such as Burgess Park that took decades from the initial proposal in the 1940s Abercrombie Plan to its first iteration in the 1970s landscaping over the old Surrey Canal dockside, factories and houses. It is equally true of the more recent pocket parks and Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, the latter exciting all kinds of opposition from the conspiracy minded and other, more understandable, objections. Sometimes, as with recent Elephant Park in Walworth, there is an element of ‘greenwashing’ to these new spaces as the demolished Heygate Estate already had a reasonably mature urban forest and open areas.
Parks are political entities and many of the ones featured in the fictional collection including Richmond and Kennington Parks, Peckham Rye as well Streatham along with most of the traditional commons of South London have been fought over for centuries. Initially these battles might have been to maintain the rights of common use from grazing to wood or other resource collection and revolved around opposition to attempts to enclose them. With increasing urbanisation encroaching on the commons later disorder and fence breaking focused on stopping development of parks for housing or, in the case of One Tree Hill, rioting to prevent a golf course. Legal means of preventing such incursions into the old commons were sometimes successful but other times not. As the traditional rhyme says:
The law condemns the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
In the 21st century it feels that all the gaps between buildings are being filled in with increasingly bulky developments to meet the city's need for housing. It’s not just us humans that need the space. The accidental playgrounds of the past are being encroached upon but if the parks, playing fields, cemeteries and private gardens of London were combined into one area they would be equivalent to the entire urban footprints of Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow and Cardiff.
In short whilst parks might be practical in terms of our mental and physical wellbeing they are also places of enchantment and joy, that need protecting and preserving as it’s worth recalling that both the Surrey Zoological Gardens and Vauxhall pleasure Gardens were nationally and internationally famous garden only their names really linger on and as for the poor Royal Flora Gardens even most SE5 folk would be astonished to learn of them.
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