Lowri Griffiths on who parks are for, who decides, and what gets lost in the management
By Lowri Griffiths
I walk through Clissold Park most mornings, which is one of the genuine pleasures of living in North London and a strong argument against moving somewhere with cheaper rent but fewer magnificent plane trees. Clissold Park is free, open, and available to everyone, which are the three facts about it that seem most important and which the park’s management history complicates in ways that I did not know until I started paying attention.
The park is managed by Hackney Council, which has managed it well by the standards of council park management, which is to say: the grass is cut, the facilities are maintained at a level that is functional rather than excellent, and the events programme has expanded to include ticketed events that generate revenue that supplements the council’s parks budget while also, depending on your perspective, occupying large areas of public green space with temporary fencing and sound systems for days at a time. The events are popular. The fencing is unpopular with the people who want to use the park during the event and cannot because they have not bought a ticket. Both things are true.
The Ticketing of Public Space
The trend of ticketed events in London’s public parks has accelerated since 2015, driven by the pressure on local authority budgets that requires parks departments to generate income from their land as well as maintain it. Councils frame this as a reasonable trade: the income from events funds the parks’ maintenance, allowing them to remain good parks rather than deteriorating ones. Critics frame it as the privatisation of public space through the back door: not selling the park, but selling access to portions of it on a rotating basis that effectively makes it semi-private for extended periods each year.
The honest version of this argument acknowledges both things: the parks need funding, ticketed events provide funding, and the parks would be worse without the income. Also: public parks are public and should be publicly accessible, and any arrangement that restricts that access, even temporarily and for ostensibly good reasons, represents a departure from the principle that makes parks valuable. The departure is worth naming even if the pragmatic arguments for it are compelling.
Who Gets to Decide
The decision about which events are held in which parks is made by the council in consultation with its parks department and, in theory, the public, through the consultation processes that councils are required to undertake for significant changes to public spaces. In practice, the consultation processes for events programming are lighter-touch than they are for physical changes to parks, and the communities most affected by events — those who live adjacent to the park and are most inconvenienced by temporary event infrastructure — are not always the communities most represented in the consultation responses. The Hackney parks programme publishes events schedules and consultation outcomes. The Fields in Trust campaigns on green space protection nationally. Lowri Griffiths covers London life at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
