REGENTS PARK

Evening Post, Volume CVII, Issue 22, 26 January 1924, Page 16

REGENTS PARK

IS IT SPOILED BY THE "GAMES

CEAZE?".

A controversy is raging round the management of Regents Park in London which has a special interest for all concerned in the arrangement of public parks everywhere, declares a correspondent of the "Manchester Guardian." Serious complaint is being made that this royal park is being spoiled for those who like to walk in it by removal of trees and the clearing away of certain shrubberies. The .official defence admits certain clearance, bu,t points out that it is impossible to meet the continual demand for playing areas .in parks without interfering, in some degree^ with the amenities of the past. Here we have battle joined. The old theory of the parks was excellently stated in the famous rebuke administered by Palmerston to "Big Bon" Hall. Hall was, as he considered, improving the amenities of the Green Park by introducing landscape gardening when Palmerston found out what was happening and stopped the work without much thought for his unfortunate subordinate's feelings. Palmerston's theory was' that the parks should be preserved as places in which people could walk about at will, and that enclosures and picturesque landscape effects were undesirable if they limited the open spaces available. The parks were for the people. So for nearly sixty years we have preserved this ideal of the parks as places for people to walk or sit in. \That era may be passing. Modern youth is not content to walk or sit, and the users of parks are now in two opposing camps. Youth demands more and more space for games; crabbed and unathletic age retorts that the parks are being spoiled in the interests of the "games craze." Yet, on the whole, one woild venture to guess that Palmerston, that typical Englishman, would have amended his original theory to meet new conditions; he would have remembered that the apprentices of^ the towns were notable players of games in "Merrie England." He would not have grudged a few shrubberies, sacrificed so that the descendants, male and female, of those apprentices should play again.