Lowri Griffiths On The City Of London Corporation’s Latest Management Proposal For The Heath, Which Residents Are Only Now Discovering Has Been In Draft For Eighteen Months

For Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.

Hampstead Heath is under quiet siege. The besieger is not a developer, is not a train line, and is not, this time, the weather. The besieger is the City of London Corporation, which has managed the Heath since 1989, and which has, over the last eighteen months, produced a 114-page management proposal that residents, walkers, swimmers, and the general Heath-using public are only now discovering exists. The proposal includes, on pages 41 to 68, a plan to install approximately 2.4 kilometres of low perimeter fencing around specific sensitive zones of the Heath, together with proposed restrictions on off-path access in four of those zones.

The Case The Corporation Makes

The case for the fencing is, on the surface, not unreasonable. The specific zones identified are ecologically sensitive areas – acid grassland, wet meadow, specific bird-nesting sites – where unregulated off-path use has, per the Corporation’s ecologists, produced measurable degradation over the last decade. The ecological data is real. The desire of the Corporation’s ecology team to protect these zones is understandable and, within limits, valid.

The Case The Heath’s Users Will Make

The case that Heath users will make, once the proposal is more widely known, is that the Heath’s historical character has rested on a specific and unusual principle: that this is a piece of near-wild land, inside London, on which people can walk where they want, with the understanding that they will behave. The Heath has operated on this principle since it became a public open space in the nineteenth century. The principle has, from time to time, produced ecological costs. It has also produced the Heath.

The Bigger Pattern

The proposal is also part of a bigger pattern. The Royal Parks, which manages several central London parks, has over the last decade been adding signage, restrictions, and quiet rules to its parks at a pace that, if you add up the individual changes, amounts to a substantial shift in how central London open spaces feel to be in. The Corporation’s Heath proposal fits this pattern. The individual restrictions are, as ever, reasonable; the cumulative effect is the one that matters.

The Democratic Question

The democratic question is, in brief, who decides. The City of London Corporation is, as an institution, not a democratic body in any conventional sense. Its management of the Heath was entrusted to it by an act of Parliament on the understanding that it would operate the Heath in the public interest. Major changes to how the Heath works should, by that understanding, be made with active public consultation, not through an eighteen-month internal drafting process.

What Should Follow

The proposal should be withdrawn to allow a genuine public consultation. This is not a radical suggestion. It is the standard operating procedure for a decision of this scale.

Further: The Poke. SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/