The focus, it was argued, should not be on trying to revive or sustain traditional structures, but in teaching and supporting good parenting and relationships. Here, potentially, was the answer to the riddle of why people’s experience of family life in Britain appeared to be improving despite the collapse in marriage and widespread relationship breakdown. As one academic put it: ‘Families are doing the same business in different conditions.’
It might just be that our society’s interest in good parenting and children’s rights, the emancipation of women and the changing role of men, the greater acceptance of gay and lesbian relationships and the challenge all these changes throw down to traditional cultural orthodoxies has, actually, produced happier families. Maybe, but I wouldn’t, necessarily, mention that in polite company.
G is for Grass
As a reporter, my natural habitat tends to be on untended grass, among the litter and dog mess of a British sink estate. In my BBC suit, tie and shiny shoes, I have stood in countless neglected urban parks, like an erratic boulder abandoned by a glacier. The local park is a good place to judge a neighbourhood. Look around. Is the description that leaps to mind ‘refuge’? Or ‘no-go area’?
Just as the condition of the village green might once have reflected the social health of an ancient British settlement, so the patches of public open space in contemporary communities are an indicator of the resilience of local people. And the biggest clue of all is the state of the grass. If a community is functioning well, the grass will tell you. The football pitch, cricket square, bowling green or public lawns: if they are cared for, the people almost certainly care for each other.
Trendy gardeners may dismiss the lawn as a monocultural abomination, but the British relationship with closely cropped turf runs too deep to be troubled by mere horticultural fashion. Our passionate affair with grass is founded upon a fierce and bloody civil war that stretches back to Tudor times and beyond: each blade is a sharp reminder of a power struggle that lasted for centuries. The battles that shaped Britain’s social structure were fought on fields of grass.
Some sociologists suggest that our love for verdant shaded lawns is based upon a primeval urge described as Savannah Syndrome, a throwback to the tree-dotted grasslands of Africa on which humanity evolved. As the philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote: ‘The foot is freer and the spirits more buoyant when treading the turf than the harsh gravel.’ However, walking on the grass in Britain came to be regarded as a privilege rather than a right, prompting inevitable unhappiness and upheaval.
When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, land previously controlled by the church was purloined by the increasingly powerful gentry. Walls were built and fences erected around commons and greens, once public spaces now enclosed for sheep rather than people. Land became a privately owned commodity. The king himself acquired vast tracts in the 1530s, including numerous acres farmed by the monks of Westminster, which he intended to turn into hunting grounds; the London parks we now know as St James’s, Regent’s Park and Hyde Park became the exclusive domain of His Royal Majesty ‘for his own disport and pastime’.
A proclamation of 1536 spelled out the pain and punishment that would befall any commoner who presumed to hunt or hawk anywhere from the palace of Westminster to Hampstead Heath. Henry had tied land ownership to social status and entrenched in British culture for centuries to come the demand for public access to green spaces. The English Civil War was essentially a power struggle between the new land-owning gentry and the older feudal landlords, a re-ordering of rights that swung to and fro with each passing decade.
Admission to the royal parks in the capital reflects the complexities of the tussle. Charles I allowed some general public access but, after the king’s execution, Oliver Cromwell closed Hyde Park and demanded an entry payment of one shilling for a coach and 6d for each horse. The Puritans had little interest in playgrounds. With the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the park gates opened wide once more, although free entrance would always be dependent on the grace and favour of the Crown. I am reminded of the limitations of the royal welcome to many of London’s glorious parks whenever I wish to place a BBC camera tripod upon their lawns. It is not public space and, unless we have obtained a permit from the sovereign, the Palace’s park keepers will, politely but firmly, escort us to the exit.
In the 1730s, Queen Caroline, the cultured German wife of George II, developed grand plans to enclose St James’s Park and the whole of Hyde Park into private royal gardens. When she enquired of the Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole what it would cost, he replied simply ‘three crowns’. The Hanoverian dynasty, which had recently succeeded to the crowns of England, Scotland and Ireland, did not dare alienate its subjects and the plan was shelved.
European observers thought there was something peculiarly British about this idea of general access to green spaces. The French novelist Abbe Prevost was amazed to witness in St James’s Park ‘the flower of the nobility and the first ladies of the court mingled in confusion with the lowest of the populace’. However, Prevost also noted the tensions within the relationship. ‘Who could imagine, for example, that the most wretched porter will contest the right of way with a lord, of whose quality he is aware, and that if one or the other stubbornly refuses to yield, they publicly engage in fisticuffs until the stronger one remains master of the pavement? This is what sometimes happens in London.’
The city park was to become the battleground for class struggle, increasingly so as hundreds of Parliamentary Enclosure Acts stripped agricultural workers of their access to pasture and meadow, forcing a landless population from the fields to the factories. As the commoners lost their commons, so the mighty landowners competed to show off their vast sweeping lawns. Hugely labour intensive, only the wealthiest could afford to maintain the acres of immaculate turf, hand-produced with scythes and shears. This was grass as a statement of authority, a display of power as emphatic as a parade of North Korean tanks in Pyongyang.
These days, landscape gardeners advertise in the local services directory between kissograms and launderettes, but in the nineteenth century, they were both culturally and politically influential figures, shaping not just the great estates but wider society.
John Loudon was among the most celebrated landscape planners of the age, engaged by the wealthy Stratton family in 1808 to redesign Tew Great Park in Oxfordshire. His landscaping was held up as a model of elegance and refinement, but as he marked out lawns and drives he was thinking about soot and smoke. Sniffing the changing wind, Loudon determined to establish himself as one of the first urban planners.
In 1829, more than a century before the creation of London’s much beloved Green Belt, Loudon proposed just such an idea in his work
Loudon came up with the idea of concentric rings of turf and gravel, which would ensure that ‘there could never be an inhabitant who would be farther than half a mile from an open airy situation, in which he was free to walk or ride, and in which he could find every mode of amusement, recreation, entertainment, and instruction’.
He instinctively believed that civic health was closely linked with access to grass, a view shared by some Parliamentarians who feared rapid industrialisation was throwing up towns and city districts unable to cope with the influx of hundreds of thousands of workers and their families. Forced to live in cramped and squalid conditions, cholera, diphtheria and small pox quickly spread among the urban poor. It was the perfect breeding ground for disease and social unrest.
In 1833 the Select Committee on Public Walks concluded that it was advantageous to all classes that there be grassy places to which wives and children (decently dressed) could escape on a Sunday evening. It seems an innocuous enough idea today, but the committee had used the phrase ‘all classes’ and, in so doing, inspired the reformers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to pen a furious demand for universal access to green spaces like Regent’s Park. ‘To call such a spot a public park is an impudent mockery,’ they wrote. ‘It is not a public park, but a place set apart for the use of the wealthy only, and the people are permitted to grind out their shoes upon the gravel, merely because they cannot be prevented.’
Although the Crown claimed that there was open access, the keys to Regent’s Park were only available to those who paid two guineas a year, a restriction justified on the basis that young trees would be injured by the mischievous and the park would become a place of assignation for young lovers. ‘Heaven preserve us!’ Bentham and Mill’s fury at the injustice explodes in mockery from the pages of their letter to the Public Walks Committee.
