Inspired by a walk in Alexandra Park
Do we need to earn ourselves the world we think we deserve?
Maybe we are all suffering from a bit of entitlement syndrome?
I was out for an early dog walk this morning, down through our local park – it was beautiful.
It’s called Alexandra Park and it has won awards. There are fine well manicured areas, parts of the park where you walk on unmade paths through verdant woodland, fishing ponds and in recent years there has been a real effort to increase the biodiversity and to create habitats for birds and insects.
Whenever you are in the park there are lots of people making use of it; dog-walkers, familes, runners, trainers taking classes, bands playing on the bandstand and there are a couple of cafes where you can relax and just soak in the atmosphere.
Like so much these days though, there’s a BUT. While the park, on the surface, looks lovely, look a little closer and you’ll see it’s maybe not as well tended as you think and certainly not as well tended as the men and women who used to work there think it should be. There’s a whole area of rose gardens, formal beds and what should be finely mown lawns. I’m told there was once a team of gardeners who looked after just that one section of the park – alas no longer. It probably gets significat attention two or three times a year and that’s it.
I’ve wondered recently how long we can expect our councils to go on funding local parks, especially one as beautiful and diverse as Alexandra Park?
Someone said to me a few years ago that when you lose something small, or the government decides to make a minor change to something or other you think, ‘that’s alright that’s not a big change I can live with that’. It’s not until a decade or so goes by and you’ve lost lots of little things and the government has made many minor changes and the cumulative effect is that you stand back and realise that what you’ve lost is not something small and insignificant but something large and significant that’s probably gone for good, that we’ve lost by stealth; a little cut here and a little cut there makes quite a big cut in the end.
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So how does this affect Alexandra Park? Well it has seen the manpower allocated to work there cut and cut and cut. The council is no longer directly responsible, like so many other councils it has hired in a contractor to maintain the park but it’s all done to an ever tightening budget.
So here’s where my argument/discussion point, call it what you will, goes off in two directions. One takes me along the easy route blaming the council and central government for everything; ‘cuts’ I could cry, give us back all those things that you’ve taken away; libraries, street sweepers, children’s play parks, community halls and I could go on and on.
Or, the other is to ask whether we could be more self reliant? We say that young people, the gen-Zers, are demonstrating signs of entitlement but are we maybe all doing that to some extent? Whatever we want we should have and to hell with who is paying?
You see I wonder if we’ve become so used to everything being done for us that we’ve forgotten how to do things, the bigger things, for ourselves? Although in a world that is becoming ever more over-regulated maybe it’s harder for the individual to do things.
So here are two simple examples of people ‘doing it for themselves’.
A few years ago a I took a group of friends from down here on the south coast for a week of hill walking in South West Scotland. As it turned out we didn’t get much walking in as the weather was foul. On the Tuesday night there were violent storms, so bad that a couple of trees came down and blocked nearby roads.
In the aftermath my southern softie colleagues were gobsmacked; they couldn’t believe how quickly the local council had acted to get out, move the trees and get the roads open. Ah but things aren’t always what they appear. I had to explain that we were deep in Galloway, a rural comnunity, where people did things for themselves and those trees had not been removed by council workmen but by local farmers and contractors with their own tractors and chainsaws. You’ll not see that happen in suburban southern England! I can’t help feel that down here if someone popped up with their own chainsaw to clear a fallen tree the ‘powers that be’ might have something to say about it!
My second example also centres around Galloway but I’m being less benevolent to the locals this time.
Many years ago, no doubt as part of some wizzard-wheeze job creation scheme, a cyclepath was created along the side of the A714 from Newton Stewart out towards Wigtown. Great idea and a much needed resource. But those in power forgot that it’s one thing to stump up the cash to build these things, quite another for a council with its budget already stretched to breaking point to come up with the on-going annual funding to pay for the maintenance.
And so it came to pass that a grand opening was followed by years of neglect and nature took its toll. The brambles grew bigger and stronger, the weeds were coming from everywhere and the cycle path became overgrown and impassable. The community looked on in horror, ‘something should be done’ locals said wringing their hands and looking at each other.
It was a repeat of the Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody story. You know the one: There was an important job to be done and Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody wouldn’t do it. It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have.
After a while a couple living nearby got fed up and decided to take matters in to their own hands and over many many months they cleared the path and opened it up again to be used as was intended. Did they get any thanks? Not a lot. Did anyone offer them some fuel to power their strimmers and hedgecutters, or to help with the costs of servicing and repair? Remember they were giving of their own time and using their own tools. Oh the answer to the question by the way was ‘no’ but you probably guessed that anyway.
Then they thought it would be a nice touch to set up a little mailbox, inside of which was a comments book where people could, among other things, leave messages of thanks and appreciation as well as explaining why they were using the path and whether they were local or visitors to the area. A lot of people left kind messages but time after time the books were vandalised and destroyed – how disheartening for our community-minded couple. Now I hear that after years of maintaining the path and keelping it open and in magnificant condition the couple are tired, they are ready to pass the reins on to someone else, but is there anyone else willing to give so much of their time, to be so community minded or is that entitled attitude creeping in?
Is that not the council’s reponsibility? Well yes it probably is but in the scramble for allocation of what little money the council has, maintaining a cycle path is well down its list of priorities and if people don’t look after it themselves then its unlikely to be looked after at all.
Whatever happened to local benefactors? The men who made their fortune and put money back into people. Think Bournville, think New Lanark. Here in Hastings we have the Brassey Institute, founded by Sir Thomas Brassey – the town’s MP – in 1879 as the Brassey School of Science and Art, the building has been home to Hastings Library for decades. Whatever happened to these wealthy men with a social conscience? Has selfishness, entitlement, in society made them think twice?
Over the years the things that these benfactors gave to communities were taken over by councils and of course there was greater regulation, rules that had to be followed and of course the ‘jobsworths’ whose role as caretaker of the community hall gave them the only power they had in their lives and oh boy did they use it.
For years councils footed the bill and nobody gave it a passing thought. Libraries, swimming pools, leisure centres, parks and local festivals we came to expect them all.
Who is to blame for the financial peril that local councils find themselves in these days is not an easy question to answer and that’s a subject for another day but lets be blunt our councils are broke struggling under the burden of increasing ‘statutory duties’ they must perform. While parks, libraries, festivals, swimming pools and leisure complexes are nice to have they are not statutory in the way that emergency housing, social care, education and social work are so when cuts are made it’s easy to guess what will be the first to go.
Just a few years ago here in East Sussex the county council announced a raft of library closures. Some communites harumphed, stamped their collective feet and folded their collective arms while tutting loudly. Others took the initiative, took on the responsibility of seeing what could be done to reopen their local library to run it by the community, for the community. Ore Community Library over on the eastern edge of Hastings is a fabulous example of a community coming together and doing something for themselves.
So back to my walk this morning. When the inevitable happens and Hastings Borough Council can no longer afford to keep Alexandra Park alive what’s going to happen? Who will fund it? Will a fence be thrown up around it with turnstyles where we have to swipe our cards to pay before we can enjoy its varied leisure opportunities? It’s an awful thought.
I’ve written before about how our society has erased the things that used to make communities, the link to that piece is at the end of this article.
I’ve done my fair share of volunteering over the years but we need more people to feel a sense of community, to want to go out and roll their sleeves up and get stuck in to doing things that will make the world around us a better place and as a result of that we might get to know each other better, oh yes and that couple near Newton Stewart might find others coming out to help them.
I’m a baby boomer, born just 16 years after the end of the second world war and I was brought up not to expect things to fall in to my lap, to appreciate what I had, the last thing that would have been allowed in my world was a sense of entitlement.
Maybe I’m just getting too old, maybe I’m a little jaundiced but maybe we get what we deserve. Maybe, if we all put some more effort into making our world a better place we would indeed, get the world we deserve.
