A Walk in the Park

          It seems that everywhere you go in urban Britain, you’re never far from Victoria Park. The ubiquity of recreational green spaces named after our late Queen reflects the history behind their establishment, rather than a fashionable name-trend. These eponymous parks were founded in an era of rapid urban expansion, when British pride and exceptionalism, fuelled by colonial expansion, were personified in the Monarch, to whom all credit was due and for whom lots of things were obsequiously named.

          Not everything. The very first publicly funded municipal park did not credit Her Majesty for its existence. Birkenhead Park, Merseyside, established in 1847, is proudly named after its pioneering community – and rightly so. Nor was it conceived as a scrap of grass surrounded by trees: the magnificence of Joseph Paxton’s design (which is said to have influenced Frederick Olmstead’s New York Central Park) retains the power to impress visitors to this day.

          But, back to Victoria’s legacy.  Our local VP, at Stonehouse in Plymouth, while certainly not magnificent, does serve the community well with its sports fields, dog-walking and picnic areas, all bordered by specimen trees. And there’s more to it than meets the eye, as was told to us by the local history buff who guided us through and around it last week.

          He showed us JMW Turner’s sketches and watercolours of the spot, made in the 1830s, when the now-infilled land was a tidal creek like so many others on the South Devon coast. His scenes are idyllically pastoral, depicting a steep, wooded bank and cultivated fields on the north side and grand houses on the south, with individual moorings at the ends of the gardens.

          What happened to change all that was population growth. The creek, into which the original spring still flows (albeit now through an underground pipe), became something of an open sewer and an inconvenient impediment to local transport. Moreover, the Royal Naval hospital on the north bank (whence derives the phrase, “up shit creek” – or so legend has it) and the nunnery on the facing south side both used adjacent land for burials, adding thereby to the unsavoury nature of the place as it developed in the years following Turner’s romantic depictions.

           All this is hard to visualise now, as you walk or cycle through the park. Although their historic, landmark buildings remain, the hospital has long been a Grammar School for boys, the nunnery was sold off and converted into flats and, though the tell-tale gravestones are not immediately apparent, bodies from the hospital and nunnery remain buried under the unconsecrated scrap of ground behind a high stone wall.

          Our guide pointed out the remains of the dogs’ drinking trough, replenished by an ornamental stone fountain, the shattered pieces of which can now be found in another local park. Back in its heyday, VP boasted a bandstand, but that too has fallen victim to the lack of funding for public spaces. The ornate, original park-keeper’s house has survived demolition by conversion into a viable café but, otherwise, upkeep depends on volunteers. If it weren’t for “friends of” various parks around the country, our public amenities would be woefully neglected. As ever more of our commonwealth is gobbled up by private ownership, ours becomes an increasingly poor country run for the benefit of a few very rich individuals.

          Still, one can dream. From one of Turner’s perspectives, the soft, rural landscape is identifiable as today’s urban location by the inclusion of Stoke Damerel church on a rise in the middle distance. Looked at this way, on a balmy, optimistic sort of day, it’s possible to imagine how the landscape used to be attractive enough for an artist to want to capture its harmony. A walk in the park can be so much more than a constitutional, don’t you think?