Underfunded, rusting and fenced off, Britain’s parks are under attack
In a summer when even Conservative voters, MPs and publications are suddenly waking up to the realisation that nothing in the UK seems to work and everything seems to be breaking – and they’re alltrying very hard to find the guy who did this – crumbling parks infrastructure may be low down the list of priorities, given the desperate state of the NHS, the social care system, our sewage-filled rivers and soaring demand for food banks.
But these are dark times for our parks, which have been devastated by annual Conservative budget cuts since 2010. Last week a Guardian investigation found that local authorities in England are spending £330m less a year on parks in real terms than they were a decade ago. The study found that less affluent parts of the country have been hit the hardest by austerity, with parks in the north-west and the north-east suffering in particular.
Our urban parks are the last vestiges of truly free public space in an age of privatised squares and local authority fire sales of public assets. They offer robust support for our mental as well as physical health, they offer us solace through solitude and joyful social space without an obligation to buy anything – they are democracy rendered in three dimensions, with jumpers for goalposts in the background.
But now drastic underfunding is seriously degrading not just the quality and safety of public parks – with reports of broken benches, rusted swings, dead trees and empty flowerbeds – but also their accessibility and very publicness.Big city parks – especially those in London, but also in Bristol, Newcastle and Nottingham – are increasingly seeking to plug the gaping holes in their budgets with commercial income generated through walled-off, paid-entry
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