Shortly before Christmas, the nine rangers who look after the parks and green spaces of Brighton and Hove were sent a text message from their bosses: six will lose their jobs under the Labour council’s austerity budget, a bonfire not of bureaucrats but of guardians of our green spaces.
Most of us imagine a squadron of Percy the Park Keepers if invited to consider “countryside managers”. In fact, this was a burgeoning profession. But conservation, keeping urban greenery safe and accessible, maintaining rights of way and promoting the outdoors are now considered inessential next to other duties of local government.
Sacking six rangers will save Brighton £175,000 a year, but will cost the city far more in the long run. Its rangers manage nearly 100 green spaces: they deploy sheep for “conservation grazing” on chalk grassland, which enables rare flowers and insects to flourish; they’ve recently organised volunteers to plant 100,000 native flowers and trees.
Picture this green space as a hospital. Would that hospital improve residents’ health if its doctors were sacked? This is not a far-fetched analogy but close to a literal truth: a forest of scientific papers shows how access to urban green spaces enhances mental and physical wellbeing – reducing blood pressure, regulating the stress hormone cortisol, increasing the attentiveness of children with ADHD.
Remove rangers, and urban spaces become rubbish-strewn places, dominated by antisocial behaviour. If people don’t feel safe, they stop venturing out, and health benefits evaporate. Sometimes these benefits are very direct: this summer, Brighton’s rangers alerted the city’s housing department to a growing number of rough sleepers, who were then found accommodation.
Environmental illiteracy reigns and in that regard Ian Rotherham, professor of environmental geography at Sheffield Hallam University, highlights the loss of expertise resulting from Sheffield’s 25-year roads contract with private contractor Amey, which is resulting in the disastrous destruction of mature street trees across the city. Green spaces, and their champions, are a crucial part of public health. We forget that at our peril.
On his Ed
By rising to become chair of Norwich City football club, former shadow chancellor Ed Balls is living my dream. Like me, he was first taken to Carrow Road as a small boy and longed to play for his home team (but wasn’t quite good enough, as those pictures of him fouling hacks during Westminster kickabouts attest).
We both settled for season tickets in the moderately raucous Upper Barclay stand, and I periodically fantasise about squandering an enormous lottery win on a club still within touching distance of normality because it is owned not by billionaires but by mere millionaires (Delia Smith and her husband). So I understand why Balls wants to swap his seat for the chair.
But I also worry. For having turned his passion into this unpaid job, he will now be scrutinised by that most irrational and ill-informed species: the football fan. Post-politics Balls will need every inch of his old thick skin. I wish him luck, for the sake of Norwich City, but also for those who dream.
Fuel from yule
Tis the season to find Christmas trees dumped on kerbs, so congratulations to Harry Wallop, writer and London resident, who tweeted his haul from a forage through the leafy streets of Islington: 22 wooden bases from abandoned trees – enough to heat a small house for a couple of days via a wood burning stove.
