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Dreamed of in 1839 on the theory – and a massive public petition to the queen – that a green area in the East End would both diminish needless death, and increase the livelihood of the population of the borough, the park opened in 1845 to grand celebration.
It has maintained its singular duty as a protector of the peoples’ health since, in every role that health takes.
Cholera rages in the streets of London, and people live in overcrowded areas with no access to clean drinking water and nowhere to go after back-breaking work at the factories. The park is yet a palace residence, owned and lived in by Bishop Bonner and the Bishops of London. Gravel and clay had taken over the ground, and the area had undergone significant changes that fit into the history of London’s expansion up until then.
That year, William Farr, an epidemiologist and medical statistician, wrote the first ever census of births and deaths of the year. As a concluding remark, he added, “A park in the East End of London would probably diminish the annual deaths by several thousands… and add several years to the lives of the entire population.”
Things moved quickly after that. Within two years, a plan had already been drawn, developed by James Pennethorne, student of John Nash who had previously designed and developed Hyde Park. The bishop’s palace which had paved over the area, and gutted the place for gravel and clay, was removed. To facilitate clean water, the Baroness Angela Burnett Coutts donated a pink marble drinking fountain, providing the East End residents their first infrastructure of clean water.
More than a place of restoration, it also served as a place of community: Speakers’ Corners, built into the park to facilitate public engagements, were taken over weekly by speakers such as William Morris, a socialist and textile designer, and Annie Besant, part of the woman’s rights movement. When the park was shuttered in World War II, its absence was sorely felt, and the damage left behind by the bombing destroyed most of the features original to it, such as the Palm House and the Pagoda.
But it was not the end.
Over the years, it gains a reputation for art: open-air music festivals, theatre re-enactments, model boat club meet-ups. For the under-fives, there is a children’s paddling pool, ringing with laughter through the summer months. Cricket, organised by the community cricket club, echoes over the park every summer evening. Open daily from the first lash of light at 7AM to the dipping orange dusk, there are always people in Victoria Park.
The other name for Victoria Park is the People’s Park, and it set a precedent.
Prior to the 1800s, the only managed greenery available was nature reserves and hunting lands owned by noble families, and typically far removed from the urban centres of the working class. These were privately owned grounds, fenced off to prevent public access. What we call the Royal Parks today are a good example of this: once, they were hunting grounds, owned by the kings and queens of the country, full of red fallow deer and pipistrelle bats, foxes and sleepy, spiky hedgehogs, insects and nesting birds and shire horses that now only number 2,000 in total. Nobles would ride wild in the forests, taking home braces of pheasants and beautiful, soft-furred foxes, accompanied by hunting dogs immortalised in paintings that now hang in the galleries.
Parks enabled a balance that the industrialisation of London removed over the years. People pressed into working in the city had already given up their lives in the outer villages to move for work, and the reputation of the rough city streets was partially because of the living conditions in the citadel itself. The introduction of a public park was as much to limit growing discontent and violence as it was a health practice: with access to water and the restorative elements of nature, people were less inclined to rebel and ruin.
This is what led to the modern park – the understanding that, as humans, we need a place to go where we can rest back with nature, a place that asks nothing of the people looking for peace.
And we have needed peace, especially in the last few years or so. When the COVID pandemic shut all other public spaces, and reduced our living quarters to a few square metres of house and home, many sought relief in public parks and in walking, to restore our sense of self – and in doing so, made parks once more the vanguard of public health, providing a way to stay healthy when every other possibility was shut off.
It’s true that the COVID-19 pandemic has wrought many other changes on the way we live and work, but the one thing that it has highlighted most succinctly is the importance of green spaces in our lives. Look at any pictures, speak to anyone about what they were doing at the time, and it’s sure to lead with, ‘well, I went to the park’.
Humans are an incredibly effusive force. Wherever we go, we shape the world around us, creating places in our vision. The locations that we do tend to, lovingly and carefully, are continuously growing to keep up with our lives, to keep up with necessities, to keep up with the way we consider the world. Our benches have solar power now: they run on a few hours of sunlight a day, from a tiny battery strip set into blond, bright wood. Wherever you go in nature, you can access the internet, provided that the work to enable access has already been done.
And despite near on three hundred years of total and radical change, the promise of the public park as a resting place has remained the very same as when, once, an anonymous poet wrote, ‘The park is called the People’s park, and all the walks are theirs’.
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