‘Righteous souls, who deprive thousands of your fellow-beings of the means of taking the most innocent and healthful enjoyment, lest the chaste park should be polluted by the whisper of ungodly passion.’ As for the risk of vandalism, Bentham and Mill accepted that the English were more destructive than other nationalities, but said that this was because ‘the people of the Continent have long been trusted in all public places… while the people of this country have been trusted scarcely anywhere, except where money has procured admission.’
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
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 on 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
