This is a fascinating, informative, revelatory book about that most commonplace and mundane feature of our cities – parks. Everybody in Britain will be familiar with a park or several parks. As Travis Elborough suggests, it is a connection that most usually begins in early childhood. Even I, as a child brought up in West Africa where there were no parks of any description, can vividly recall the first one I came to know well – Duffus Park in Cupar, Fife. I was regularly sent there to play when we returned from Africa to stay with my grandmother in Scotland. I can revisit Duffus Park and its many acres in my head, almost as if a virtual video of the place is playing behind my eyes, even though I haven’t set foot in it for decades. Such is the folkloric power of the park in our forming minds.
I now live near one of London’s great parks – Battersea – and walk through it almost every day. What’s more, in 2009 I was commissioned by the Royal Parks of London to write a short story set in one of their parks. I chose Green Park, which is between Piccadilly and Buckingham Palace. Bizarrely, for a short time, I became a kind of spurious park expert, with all sorts of opinionated theories about these magical places.
The fundamental point, as Elborough’s book makes clear, is that not many people give much thought to parks: they use them, they enjoy them, they traverse them, they may misbehave in them. But the parks of our country’s cities and towns have histories in the same way that notable buildings have – except these histories are buried or only covertly available. A notice on a gatepost, a statue by a shrubbery, some particular feature or other – a lake, a folly – may alert us to the fact that the park we are in was something conceived and constructed; created often with a specific purpose in mind and with significant ambitions to fulfil. The vast array of knowledge that Elborough disperses in this book will make you look at parks differently.
What precisely is it that makes this area of greenery in a city a proper park, per se – as opposed to a garden or a collection of playing fields or a square or a common? Here are the five fundamental criteria that I suggest must be met to achieve true “parkdom”. First, the trees must be mature. A newly planted park – a park of saplings – doesn’t qualify. Second, the trees must be randomly planted – the odd avenue is allowed, perhaps an allée of pleached lime trees – but the impression must be natural, not designed. Third, there must be undulations in the ground: slopes, hillocks and valleys. Complete flatness – like the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, for example – is somehow counter to the idea of a park. The illusion of essentially unlandscaped nature is key – genuine rus in urbe is the primary aim. Water is good – a lake, a river, a boating pond, fountains – but not a necessary condition. Some of the most idyllic parks are entirely waterless.
Fourth is the question of scale. There are small parks and vast parks. St James’s Park in London is small, Central Park in New York is huge – but the key thing is that it must be large enough that you can’t see all of it at once. Not every boundary must be visible from one point. Fifth, there must be a gate, or gates. Walls and/or railings are even better – the boundaries defined. There must be one or several portals.
And what of its history, as presented by Elborough? His book’s structure is roughly chronological, looking at how kings and noblemen fenced off and sequestered areas of land for their hunting pleasure. Hyde Park, for instance, was a royal hunting ground in its first incarnation. Gradually, as modern cities took shape in the 19th century, the philanthropic idea was born that it was worth preserving some areas of greenery in the noisome urban sprawl – and so the first proper parks were born.
This makes it all seem rather straightforward but the chief delights of Elborough’s survey of this “people’s institution”, as he terms it, are his learning and range of reference. For instance, in his chapter devoted to the development of parks after the first world war, he discusses the creation of municipal golf courses in parks, throwing in a mention of Jordan Baker, a character in The Great Gatsby who plays golf, and whose attraction is due in part to her “slender golden arms”. This leads on to the increasing chicness of sporting a tan (thank you, Coco Chanel), the growth of sunbathing in parks, the emergence of bathing lakes, the development of swimming costumes and the introduction of the lido.
London, Elborough tells us, had 13 lidos in the 1930s. He writes: “Commenting on the 200-feet-long pool in Victoria Park which opened in 1936 and was capable of accommodating a thousand people, Dick Coppock, chair of the LCC’s Parks Committee, spoke of bringing the ‘seaside to east London’ and maintained the lido was ‘as good as Margate’.” Citing Victoria Park and the 1930s prompts a comment on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists’ rallies in the park – and so forth. There is a kind of enthusiastic, voluble free association – subject spawning new subject – effortlessly maintained by Elborough as he moves through the decades of the park’s metropolitan evolution.
But then we reach the present day, and the mood becomes somewhat minatory as Elborough notes the mounting threat that population increase and property development pose to the green “lungs” at the heart of our crowded cities. He specifies the violence over the attempt to close and redevelop (as a shopping mall) Istanbul’s Gezi Park in Taksim Square as a particularly brutal example of this governmental and corporate seizure of public space, but also points out that, in London, the site of the 2012 London Olympics, now grandly named Queen Elizabeth II Park, was deliberately not given true protected “park” status and handed over to the local borough. It is, in fact, administered by something called the London Legacy Development Corporation – that “legacy” is the sleazy giveaway. Just how public is this public park going to remain?
“You don’t know what you’ve got ’till it’s gone,” Joni Mitchell sang. “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” Parks seem an immutable, strangely paradisiacal element of our fraught and complicated urban lives, but the fact that we actually have them, as Elborough demonstrates in this wonderful book (but please could we have an index for the paperback), is something to be marvelled at. They have to be vigorously cherished and protected. We should never take them for granted.
• William Boyd’s latest novel, Sweet Caress (Bloomsbury), is out in paperback. To order A Walk in the Park for £15.19 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
