New park for South London

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33065, 4 November 1972, Page 12

New park for South London

(From SANDRA JOBSON in London)

Planners in Sydney may want to invade Centennial Park, but the opposite is happening in London, where everybody knows the value of a park. The north side of the Thames is laced with green, squares and acres of parkland: Hyde Park (360 acres); Kensington Gardens (275 acres), Green Park (53 acres), and St James’s Park (93 acres), all of them, like so many other elegant things, the legacy of kings. Now, the grimy industrial desert of South London is to have a lung transplant — a new park of 135 acres to revive half a million suffocating people. Plans for the new park were announced recently and already bulldozers have cleared 35 acres of slum tenemnets. By the end of the decade, 60 acres near the Old Kent Road will have been turned into parkland. It will have a 14-acre lake where people can sail or swim; there will be a riding centre; playing fields; bandstands; plenty of trees and grass; an animal enclosure and a tropical arboreum for romantic South Londoners who can’t afford to fly off to the African jungle or the South Seas. Uses for parks Such a Utopian project is a miracle in a city the size of London with a population five times that of Sydney, and a chronic housing problem. But the Greater London Council planners have faced the facts of high density living: there has to be a park. As Sydney goes high rise, the same problems will loom. You only have to walk in the gates of London’s Hyde Park on a warm summer’s day to see how a park should be used. Of all the parks in London, this is the most natural. If you stand right in the centre, surrounded by great, glorious oaks and elms, you could imagine you were in the country. A party of riders gallops along Rotten Row and you can almost hear the hunting horns. No sight or sound of the big city penetrates. Down on the Serpentine they’re rigging sails on small boats and easily pulling at the oars of rowboats. An invalid in a motorised wheelchair draws up and sets up his fishing rod, and a local flat dweller brings her pet duck for its daily swim. Further on, the annual sheepdog trials are being held, and in the Serpentine Museum is an exhibition of space-age art. The band is playing in the rotunda and diners enjoy a glass of wine in the glasshouse restaurant by the Serpentine. Runners and swimmers Keep-fit enthusiasts lap the park boundaries each morning or follow the lines of evenly-space trees marked with a “J" (for jog) by an obliging park-keeper at the request of the former Minister for Technology, Mr Ernest Marples, who is out there with the best of them every day. And a 7 a.m., summer and winter, the swimmers gather at the Serpentine. In winter they sometimes have to cut the ice open before they take the plunge, but nothing deters this intrepid brigade. Hyde Park Comer is another year-round attraction. Currently the star is Webster, fresh from Sydney’s domain, king of the international soap box circuit, taking a busman’s holiday. Hyde Park is a public forum, but it can also be the most private place in the world. A newly-married couple, dressed identically in white satin pants suits, wander hand-in-hand through the hanging tree branches, oblivious to all. Safe at night Church bells from Kensington and Knightsbridge filter through the green leaves to an old man sitting on an Edwardian bench, gazing into the past. In one quiet comer is a pets’ cemetery dedicated to the rest of all the dogs which gambolled about the park over the centuries. In another comer a youth serenades a girl with his guitar and a white-turbaned religious sect does yoga exercises. Hyde Park is remarkably safe to walk in at night, unlike New York’s Central Park. Before the gates close, usually about 11.45 p.m. in summer, it is a restful place to wander about in after a hard day’s work. People feed the ducks on the mirror-still pond, or cut across the trees to a concert at the Albert Hall. The park has its own police station, a mellow red-brick and slateroofed building tucked away in a grove of trees. Residents’ wishes The Hyde Park police are a genial, discreet group. If there is any trouble they deal with it firmly and quietly: who wants to spoil the pleasant atmosphere of the park? The planners hope that London’s new I irk on the other side of the Thames will be equally pleasant. Local residents of Southwark, Lambeth and Lewisham are being consulted for ideas which can be incorporated into the plan. Suggestions are being invited for a name for the park. But some professional environmentalists are critical. They say that a new large metropolitan park in London is wasteful and old-fashioned. A number of smaller

parks would be more useful. But the residents disagree. They want somewhere large enough so they can forget they are in a city. The enlightened planning which has produced the new park is echoed in the overall Greater London development plan, which sets out standards for the provision

of open space. It details the exact ratio of open space to developed areas and defines it in distances each citizen must travel to reach a park. In the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea where the western part around Notting Hill is reviving as a pleasant residential area, a local study has gone

even further and has suggested that the counc.l should provide extra open spaces above the requisite life, all over the world. becomes more crowded, violent and polluted. more and more people are going to say “Thank God for a park."