I have a difficult relationship with nature, which I believe is how it should be. Last week, I put my dressing gown on after getting out of the shower and felt a prickling sensation on my thigh. A wasp flew out, and my leg swelled up, and I cursed these beasts I am compelled to live alongside, and the loving friction we create.
As spring creeps in I’m out among that nature again, among the trees and the grasses, and the wild garlic with its stench and flowers. At the back of my local park there are acres of the stuff, largely left alone despite the Sunday Times recently describing it as “cultural currency”, a “disruptor, as everyone puts down their mobiles and goes out to forage” and “the root of all joy and smuggery”. Where I live, though, the garlic causes yet more friction, as distant neighbours take to NextDoor to complain about families collecting it in quantities they resent and others explain it’s a weed or a wildflower, which benefits from picking and, besides, shut up. And for all my suspicion of the outside world, my insistence that nature is too green and badly lit, this is one thing I do agree on: nature is for everyone, in all its horrible glory.
When Haringey council in London rented part of Finsbury Park to endurance event company Tough Mudder in April, hundreds of racers trampled the park, leaving areas of it a swampy field of mud. Local MP David Lammy called it an “environmental disgrace”, but the more immediate impact was the way it was vandalised, leaving parts of the park unusable. Despite the muddying of the grass, the path to this point is remarkably clear. Local authority funding has shrunk by £15bn in real terms since 2010, leading to councils relying on commercial income from parks, as well as reducing investment in them. A 2022 Guardian investigation found that councils in deprived areas (where people are less likely to have access to green spaces) had cut spending on parks by up to 92% since 2010. It’s nothing new, the councils’ makeshift privatisation of public spaces, but since the pandemic, to me it does seem to hit a little harder.
It’s seen as gauche, perhaps, to still be talking about those lockdown months, when general messaging seems that we should surely have moved on by now, or chosen to forget. But for many of us the ripples are still rippling, whether through our children’s mental health, or our relationships, or our mad, barking pets. One lifeboat we had back then was that rationed bit of exercise, our daily walk. Which meant, in cities especially, the local park became more than a sum of its parts: a refuge, an equaliser, a place where single people could meet dates for distanced strolls, where women could stretch, where dogs could take a shit in relative peace. Less wholesome activities, too – historically, this is the place where teenagers can drink, and children scream, and affairs be conducted, and drugs discovered, and people can go when there’s nowhere else to be. The park’s potential was revealed: a space that was all of ours and for us.
In 2019, after eight years of austerity, their funding cut by 60%, councils sold off thousands of public spaces, including libraries, community centres and playgrounds. An added little kick: the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found 64 councils in England had spent a third of the money made from selling these public assets on making staff redundant. Locality, a campaign group fighting to save public spaces, estimates that nearly half of all public land in Britain has been sold off since the 1970s; they say nearly 4,000 public spaces and buildings are being sold off every year in England alone. Sometimes they’re turned into flats and offices, sometimes those offices are surrounded by “privately owned public spaces”, with security guards patrolling, and cameras in the trees, and no photos, or protests, or rough sleeping allowed. They look like parks, but feel once removed – like an illustration of a park, or a photocopy.
The chipping away of our public spaces makes me wonder, who is a city for? Just as our remaining libraries and community centres became “warm banks” for people who couldn’t afford to heat their houses, our remaining parks and public spaces will inevitably home people who have been forced on to the streets. The developers of privately owned public spaces are not interested, however, in building spaces for these poorer or homeless populations; the parks they design are commercial and shiny, and unwelcoming to all but those able to pay the entrance fee of a £3 coffee and £6 sandwich.
The idea of a town with only these private parks is chilling. I write this as someone who’s been known to resent a sunny day. As someone vastly more comfortable on a sofa than a lawn, as someone who believes nature is not magic, not a cure-all, not something that exists for us, and, instead, something that persists despite us. Which is one reason I will fight for the public park: it’s a place where we can meet nature on our own terms.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
