Lowri Griffiths on why the last genuinely public space in the city is quietly crumbling

My local park is, on a good day, the best free thing in the entire city. Sun, grass, a pond with ducks who regard the general public with the specific contempt only a duck can muster, and, crucially, no admission fee, no membership, no minimum spend. In a city that increasingly seems to want a small transaction from you at every possible turn, the park remains stubbornly, gloriously free.

Which is, I have come to realise, exactly why nobody in power seems particularly bothered about keeping it nice.

The Bench That Started This

There is a bench near the pond that has had a broken slat for, by my rough count, at least eight months. I know this because I sit on it, carefully, avoiding the specific gap, most mornings, and have watched the gap slowly widen from a minor inconvenience to something you could plausibly lose a smaller dog through.

I finally reported it to the council, via the app that exists specifically for this purpose, and received a confirmation number and, some weeks later, absolutely no bench repair whatsoever. When I followed up, I was told, not unkindly, that the parks maintenance budget had been reduced and that non urgent repairs were being prioritised based on severity, and that a broken bench slat, while noted, did not currently meet the threshold.

What Does Meet The Threshold

I do not actually know what does meet the threshold, since the bench remains exactly as it was, gap and all, and I have started to suspect that the threshold itself may be somewhat theoretical, a bureaucratic concept invoked to explain why things that cost money to fix generally do not get fixed unless someone falls through them first.

This is not, to be clear, a criticism of any individual council worker, several of whom I have spoken to and who seem genuinely frustrated by budgets that have been reduced repeatedly over the years while the actual physical park, its grass, its trees, its increasingly perilous bench, continues existing and requiring maintenance regardless of what the spreadsheet says is available.

The Free Thing Nobody Funds Properly

Local government funding research has documented sustained real terms reductions in parks and green space budgets across numerous London boroughs over an extended period, a trend that tracks closely with broader local authority funding pressures affecting statutory services that councils are legally required to provide, services that, unlike parks maintenance, cannot simply be quietly deprioritised without triggering genuine legal and political consequence.

Parks, having no statutory minimum service level in the same way that, say, social care does, become an easy place to trim when budgets tighten, precisely because nobody is going to sue a council over a broken bench slat, however much they might grumble about it to a small local blog.

The Volunteers Filling The Gap

What has genuinely moved me, watching this unfold, is the small volunteer group that has started meeting on Sunday mornings to do informal upkeep the council budget no longer stretches to, weeding flower beds, picking up the litter that the reduced cleaning schedule no longer quite covers, and, in one memorable case, attempting an amateur repair on my nemesis bench using what I can only describe as considerable optimism and a roll of duct tape.

It did not work, structurally speaking, but the gesture moved me more than I expected. A dozen or so local residents, none of them paid, none of them obligated, quietly doing the maintenance that a shrinking council budget can no longer guarantee, because they love this specific patch of grass and refuse to simply watch it decline.

The Uncomfortable Question

I want to be honest about the tension this raises, because it is not a comfortable one. On one hand, volunteer stewardship of public space is genuinely lovely, a real expression of community care that I do not want to dismiss or undermine. On the other hand, it should not be necessary. A public park maintained only through the goodwill of unpaid volunteers is a public park whose actual funding has quietly failed, dressed up in language about community spirit that lets everyone feel good about a service that should, frankly, be properly resourced by the people whose job it is to resource it.

I do not think the volunteers themselves would disagree with this. Several told me, over their duct tape and their weeding forks, that they would much rather the council simply fund proper maintenance and let them enjoy the park as ordinary users rather than unpaid stand in groundskeepers, but that in the meantime, someone has to weed the flower beds, and it is clearly not going to be anyone with an actual maintenance budget.

What Free Actually Costs

The park costs nothing to enter and, it turns out, quite a lot to maintain properly, and the gap between those two facts is currently being filled by a mixture of shrinking council budgets, extremely patient volunteers, and one increasingly precarious bench that I continue to sit on, carefully, avoiding the gap, because it remains, despite everything, the best free seat in the neighbourhood.

Where This Leaves Us

I do not have a neat solution, beyond the obvious one that better funding would fix quite a lot of this and better funding does not currently appear to be forthcoming. What I do have is a renewed appreciation for the volunteers, a healthy wariness of my local bench, and a small, persistent hope that a genuinely public, genuinely free space, the kind this city has fewer and fewer of, might one day be treated by the people who fund it as being worth more than the absolute bare minimum required to avoid outright collapse.

Further Reading

More of my writing on the small civic dramas of North London can be found at my author page at The London Prat, and further city coverage is available at Bohiney Magazine. Related material is collected at NewsThump.

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com