LONDON LETTER:London's royal parks are a sanctuary for millions, but increasingly they are feeling the strain, writes MARK HENNESSY
THE BLACK Eyed Peas played Hyde Park in early July. A scantily clad Fergie thrilled fans with Big Girls Don't Cry,while a DJ delighted more as he performed a set wearing an electric-green jacket while standing on a crane.
The neighbours were not quite so happy. Following three days of concerts from the band Blur and others, Paul Appleyard – himself a musician and music-arranger – wrote to his local MP, Conservative Mark Field, to complain wearily about the experience.
The noise at 10pm was worse than a busy building site by day, he told Field, while “the bass from this infernal racket” – Field’s words – was such that the glassware in Appleyard’s flat rattled. Closing the windows – an uncomfortable act during London’s sultry weather – did nothing to improve matters.
Hyde Park is one of London’s eight royal parks: the others are Bushy, Green, Greenwich, Regent’s, Richmond, St James’s and Kensington Gardens. Each year, the parks, a vital lung for the city, are visited by 37 million people.
The commercialisation of the parks has excited concern for years, particularly following a Red Bull Flugtag in 2004 which was “the most destructive event the park has ever witnessed”, with trees “badly and permanently damaged”, along with wide-scale graffiti.
Like other public bodies, the Royal Parks Agency is facing cuts, – up to 36 per cent over the next five years – while the agency’s capital budget was cut at a stroke by 45 per cent by chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne.
Faced with the pressures of recent years, the agency has become more commercial, doubling its revenues from hosting concerts and other events to £14.4 million in the last five years. Indeed, nearly half of its budget now comes from such sources.
Conservative MP Nicholas Soames, who represents Mid-Sussex but is a regular visitor to the parks, is not alone in believing that this is not a good thing: “There is a limit to how much those priceless, utterly unique places can physically take.” However, the agency’s thirst for outside revenues is leaving local councils with bills, since “an influx of humanity causes great waste”, as Field described it, without them getting any of the income generated.
So far, Greenwich, which will host the equestrian events at next year’s Olympics, is the most affected, with significant sections of the park already cordoned off. Locals are not happy, with many feeling the equestrian events should have been hosted at Badminton or Windsor.
Residents living near the other parks are concerned the Olympics will affect them too, leading the Knightsbridge Association and residents of St George’s Fields to pen letters to Westminster City Council.
However, the eight parks are not just for locals, minister of state for culture John Penrose pointed out, saying that they are “a priceless national asset”. Some conflict is unavoidable “and it has always been that way ever since the royal parks were set up in the 1850s”.
Indeed, the most commercial event ever hosted by the royal parks was the 1851 Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which attracted six million visitors between May and October of that year, each paying between £5 and £300 in today’s money for the privilege.
The Black Eyed Peas, the minister acknowledged, had irritated locals; but so, too, had the Chemical Brothers a night later – though Field, not wanting to be portrayed as curmudgeonly, said he was “a keen fan” of the latter even if he “prefers to listen to them in my living room”.
The governance of the royal parks is to change shortly, moving partly under the control of mayor of London Boris Johnson, who will have the right to nominate a 12-strong board, though Johnson’s control will not go as far as had been originally mooted. Ownership will remain vested in the Crown, while the parks agency will remain part of the department of culture, media and sport but the new board will “provide a voice for the mayor and London”.
The decision not to cede control completely to Johnson may not be entirely unrelated to next year’s mayoralty election, where the Conservative is facing the challenge of two-times mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone.
Reflecting the views of Westminster City Council, Field said: “I am concerned that any mayor, particularly one in the mould of Ken Livingstone, who was mayor for eight years before 2008, might be tempted to promote populist causes to the long-term detriment of their fabric.”
The ebullient Johnson would have enjoyed dominion over the parks, particularly having discovered in a Who Do You Think You Are? documentary that he is related to the Hanoverian King of Great Britain and Ireland, King George II.
Indeed, Johnson’s blue-blooded ancestors had some direct involvement with the parks, since George II’s daughter, Princess Amelia, “one of the oddest princesses that ever was known; she has ears shut to flattery and her heart open to honesty”, served as ranger of Richmond Park.