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
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,
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
