Coming to a park near you?

Good afternoon all
 
You may be interested in the following article, published in the Evening Standard, last Friday:
 

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Cycling home through Battersea Park’s explosion of green always soothes my soul. Tonight I won’t bother: this week and the next two, the park is a giant, ugly building site. 

Swarms of workmen are putting up thousands of huge concrete blocks topped by high fences to line the track for the Formula E electric car races on June 27/28. I’ve never seen anything like it. And it’ll be the same for the next five summers, unless the council invokes a contract break clause — something outraged locals are now urging.

It’s just the most egregious example of a growing trend: the pimping out of London’s parks to raise cash.
The Royal Parks were first, with pop concerts in the eastern half of Hyde Park, shutting off a wide swathe of green behind high walls. Last night we saw the start of this year’s series of British Summer Time concerts.

But it’s growing in our local parks too. Last year Lambeth council gave its new Event Lambeth arm the goal of increasing the current total of about 10 major events in its parks every year to 40. The result? Last weekend’s Found techno festival closed off much of my local Brockwell Park to the public. The reason, of course, is budget cuts. The Royal Parks have had their central government cash funding cut from £18.8 million in 2009/10 to just under £13.2 million this year. More than half their income now has to be self-generated.

Wandsworth council initially rejected Formula E as being too disruptive. Then the boy racers came back with an offer the town hall couldn’t refuse: it won’t say how much, except that “we expect the fee to include £1 million we have earmarked to spend on major maintenance projects in Battersea Park over the next five years”. Between 2010 and 2018 Wandsworth will have had to make cuts totalling £120 million.

Lambeth, meanwhile, is making  £90 million of cuts over the next three years. Since 2010/11, its parks budget has dropped by more than  £1.6 million — that’s nearly a third.

Last year a Heritage Lottery Fund report warned that “unless future funding is generated in new ways, parks are at risk of rapid decline and even being sold off and lost to the public forever”.

But if our parks are regularly rented out to the highest bidder, they’re no longer truly public. We’re degrading  our green spaces, one of London’s  glories — and all for sums dwarfed by the average Whitehall department’s consultancy bill.

Andrew Neather