Oliver in the park

Moment of undiluted content, sharing fallen leaves with my grandson in Handsworth Park. These are from our plane trees, broad and brown; good for falling on; being buried and shuffling all over the place. By the pond are willow leaves, yellow and curved like little scimitars, to be picked up in a bunch and thrown above our heads spinning as they fall, winning shrieks of pleasure and surprise. Down by the pond under the intense guardianship of eye and hand Oliver sits by the bank as across the grey city water we're approached by hopeful fowl - Canada geese, coot, duck, moorhen, two married swans like galleons with their cygnets - no longer ugly ducklings. Oscar dog stands on an outcrop of stone and earns open beak hisses from cob and pen, but Oliver and I are treated as benign; allowed to stare.

*** ***
First thing in the morning I'd cycled to Aston station, taken the train to Blake Street and cycled about three miles in car-land to Aldridge Parish Church…

Car-land on the way to Aldridge from Blake Street

Aldridge Parish Church

…to give a talk about the Founding of Handsworth Park to over fifty members of the Probus Club of Aldridge. Nearly 15 years after I wrote a history of how Handsworth Park was invented in the 1880s its story has  taken more secure form in my mind. Good. When I asked how many of this audience, white men of my age and older, had visited Handsworth Park, over two third raised their hands. Yet to me Aldridge feels so different from my Handsworth I'm made slightly nervous by the prospect of explaining how much I love this park and how much I've learned about it over twenty five years.
"Our park was not, like many fine city parks, a gift from a philanthropic landowner. It had to be paid for by local ratepayers in what was then the rich and salubrious village of Handsworth in rural Staffordshire, at comfortable remove from the the smoke, noise and mess of the great working city of Birmingham. But Birmingham was spreading. Relentlessly."
I quote what I and others have written:

Birmingham’s expanding population sought new living space, leaving only the poorest in the insanitary courts of the city centre and even these were soon edged away by the Corporation Street “improvement scheme” initiated in 1875 and finished in 1882 at a cost of over £1½ million. A familiar idea of “inner city” was not so much when the poor increased but when they no longer lived so close to the unpoor. In addition there were houses closer to the city centre, such as the Jewellery Quarter, whose artisan owners were converting them into workplaces and setting up home further away while still working in the city. Handsworth, many of whose residents had a special connection to Hockley and St.Pauls, was only one of the outlying parishes of Birmingham to undergo a process of transformation to “suburb”: 'While it was going on, the process gratified landowners, developers, builders and the occupants of the new suburbs, or at least continued to lure them with the prospects of profits, status, and happiness, but pleased practically no-one else. Contemporary social and architectural critics were fascinated and appalled by the mindless, creeping nature of the sprawl ... The ceaseless activity of the builders, the alarming rapidity with which they turned pleasant fields into muddy, rutted building sites, the confusion of hundreds of building operations going on simultaneously, without any discernible design, the impression that little schemes were starting up everywhere at once and were never being finished, were in themselves frightening portents of disorder and chaos…' Thompson, F.M.L. (ed.) (1982) The Rise of Suburbia (Leicester:University Press) pp.67-68.

The talk went well. I nearly enjoyed myself. Over coffee, one old man - my age - said "I wonder of some of those people you quoted, when the case was being made for a park in Handsworth, would have believed their words are being quoted now?" I'd read from some of the conscientiously reported transcripts of local leaders arguing for the park, debating with sceptics and people downright opposed to having their rates spent on a park in what was still countryside…and especially the concerns of the Vicar of St.Mary's Church, Handsworth:

Dr. Randall rose amid the uproar to make what the Handsworth News reporter, with irony, called the speech of the evening: “I will answer for myself. Allow me to say that from my heart I am the last man in the parish to stand between any object which is for the welfare of the people of the parish. It is because I don't think it is for the well-being that we should have the park that I lift up my voice against it. We have an agricultural parish, and we have some of the finest air in the kingdom, and I believe that the park will be more for the benefit of the roughs of Birmingham.” (a perfect howl of dissent, uproar for at least a minute and cries of “shame” followed by alternations of groaning and cheering)  Dr. Randall spoke of people leaving the parish because of the heavy rates. (“hear, hear” and applause) He thought the Local Board had erred through jubilee zeal or some other zeal.(laughter) The vendors had taken advantage of that zeal to raise the price. (clamour) “I will state on my honour and word that the same land including the house has been offered to me even a few months ago, first at £7000 and then at £6000. If on no other ground I will oppose the purchase because it is above the price at which it has been offered to a private individual.” (great cheering and interruption, Babel itself was not in it with the confusion of sounds that then ensued)..p.16 of my history, drawing on unnamed reporters for the Handsworth News and the Handsworth Gazette, 19 Jan 1887

"...If the park is established I feel sure that in a very few years houses will be built in the locality which will render no extra rate necessary to support the park” (laugher and cries of “no, no”). Mr. Lines sits down and Mr. Wainwright rises to reply:
He was commendably brief, but exceedingly earnest, and his short fiery speech was admirably adapted to secure his purpose. Every word told, and the promise that the Board would, if the resolution were carried, do all their promised work without raising the rate, and throw in the park as well, seemed to produce the desired effect. Having concluded his speech, Mr. Wainwright put the resolution, and hands having been held up on either side, he declared that..
IT WAS CARRIED,
..much to the disgust of many on the platform. Mr.Jacobs loudly protested that the proposition was lost and demanded a poll. Mr.Cooper offered to place in the hands of the clerk or the chairman a cheque sufficiently large to cover the expenses of a poll. Mr. Ellis fumed and Dr. Randall looked disconsolate. But the clerk explained that the Board had no power to arrange for a poll of the ratepayers and the malcontents had to satisfy themselves with empty protest and not too polite observations as to the chairman and his manner of conducting the proceedings. Meantime, Mr. Wainwright, with radiant face and beaming eyes, left the platform, being heartily congratulated by his friends and supporters, and as we elbowed our way out of the still crowded room, we felicitated ourselves on the fact that the vexed question of a public park for Handsworth had been set at rest, with every appearance of the settlement arrived at, being a final and permanent one. Handsworth News, Jan. 22 1887 (pp.16-17 my account)

Even so in the final paragraph of my account (and all my talks about the creation of Handsworth Park) I conclude 
*for instance The Economic Value of Protected Open Space or a much circulated Japanese study on the link between longevity and walkable green space.