Life-limiting advice in English parks is bad for us all | Eva Wiseman

I have a difficult relationship with nature, and I think that's how it should be. Last week I put my dressing gown on when I got out of the shower and felt a tingling sensation on my thigh. A wasp flew up, and my leg swelled up, and I cursed these beasts I'm forced to live with, and the love friction we create. m again among this nature, among the trees and grasses, and wild garlic with its stench and flowers. At the back of my local park are acres of stuff, largely left alone despite the Sunday Times recently describing it as "cultural currency", a "disruptive, because everyone puts down their cellphones and goes out foraging" and "the root of all joy and complacency". Where I live, however, garlic causes even more friction, as distant neighbors come to NextDoor to complaining about families collecting it in quantities they don't like and others explaining that it is a weed or a wild flower, which benefits from the picking and, moreover, is silent. distrust of the outside world, my insistence that nature is too green and poorly lit, there is one thing I agree on: nature is for everyone, in all its horrible glory .

When Haringey Council in London leased part of Finsbury Park to endurance events company Tough Mudder in April, hundreds of runners stomped on the park, leaving swampy areas of mud. Local MP David Lammy called it an "environmental disgrace", but the most immediate impact was how it was vandalized, leaving parts of the park unusable. Despite the muddy grass, the path to this point is remarkably clear. Local authority funding has fallen by £15billion in real terms since 2010, leading councils to rely on commercial income from parks, as well as reducing investment. A 2022 Guardian survey found that councils in deprived areas (where people are less likely to have access to green space) had cut their spending on parks by up to 92% since 2010. It's not new, the advice of makeshift privatization of public spaces, but since the pandemic, it seems to me to be hitting a little harder.

It may be- be considered left to still talk about those month-long shutdowns, when general messaging seems like we should surely have moved on by now, or chosen to forget. But for many of us, the repercussions are still being felt, whether through the mental health of our children, our relationships, or our crazy, barking pets. A lifeboat we had at the time was that little bit of rationed exercise, our daily walk. Which meant, in cities especially, that the local park became more than a sum of its parts: a refuge, an equalizer, a place where single people could meet for walks from a distance, where women could stretch, where the dogs could shit in relative peace. Less healthy activities too - historically this is where teenagers can drink, and children scream, and business unfolds, and drugs are discovered, and people can go when there's nowhere to go be. The potential of the park was revealed: a space that was all ours and for us.

In 2019, after eight years of austerity, their funding cut by 60%, municipalities sold off thousands of public spaces, including libraries, community centers and playgrounds. A little extra nudge: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that 64 councils in England had spent a third of the money from the sale of these state assets to lay off staff. Locality, a campaign group fighting to save public spaces, estimates that nearly half of all public land in Britain has been sold since the 1970s; they say nearly 4,000 public spaces and buildings are sold each year in England alone. Sometimes they're turned into apartments and offices, sometimes those offices are surrounded by 'private public spaces', with security guards patrolling and cameras in the trees, and no photos, protests or sleeping on the streets is not allowed. They look like parks, but feel once removed - like a park illustration or photocopy.

The crumbling of our public spaces makes me wonder, who is a city for? Just as our remaining libraries and community centers became "hot banks" for people who could not afford to heat their homes, our remaining parks and public spaces have...