Parks are meant to be for pleasure not business
When does a park become a business premises? The answer is now. The area of Kensington Gardens opposite the Royal Albert Hall, setting for the glorious Albert Memorial, is ornamental landscape as fine as it comes. If you owned it, the Government would not let you touch it. But if the Government owns it, the only question is: how much will you to pay to wreck it?
The site is occupied by London Fashion Week, but it might as well have been a Burberry's show or a big fat gypsy wedding. Marquees, barriers, roadways, scaffolding, stairs, security guards and trailer parks infest the area. Down the road a large chunk of park was recently fenced off for Winter Wonderland. Soon it will be summer wonderland, and the Wireless festival with Rihanna and Drake, then Madonna, U2 and Bruce Springsteen. The O2 Dome is coming up west.
With complaints at the noise and congestion soaring from residents in the area, Westminster council has tried to call a halt. It wanted the number of concerts in the park cut to six from 13, the decibel level cut from 75 to 73 and the maximum audience reduced from 80,000 to 50,000 people. These cuts hardly seem drastic, except to someone's profit.
The entertainment industry responded with whingeing and blackmail, saying that “top acts will refuse to perform if forced to turn down the volume”. John Diggings of Solo Productions calls the sound restriction “ludicrous” and Hyde Park “the jewel in the crown?? the premier league” of music venues.
Backing them, the Royal Parks agency is for noise. Any curb on volume, it says, “would result in the cancellation of all concerts in Hyde Park this year and beyond”. Now the council has partly backed down, accepting nine concerts next year and insisting merely that the decibel level stick to 75 and that only four may have audiences as big as 65,000.
What is shocking is that it should be the council rather than the parks agency that is showing any concern for peace in the parks. The agency has already sold most of St James's Park, with the Mall and Admiralty Arch, to the Olympics organisers for the summer, barricading them from the public to “prepare for” beach volleyball on Horse Guards Parade. What was meant as a foible for Tony Blair's lascivious staff now means a park closed for a whole season in favour of a few bikini-obsessed “Olympic family” plutocrats. The people's Games?
Written into the history of London's royal parks was that they should be open, free to all and not used for commercial activities. They were a relief from the noise and crowds of the city, places of rurality, repose and peace, not for business. The sign outside Regent's Park was always explicit. It was (and presumably still is) illegal to “carry on any trade or business” or to “offer anything for sale or hire”. Even trade vehicles with advertising on their sides were banned. “No entertainment or other performances may take place?? and no collections of monies may take place.”
This could hardly be more emphatic. A few summer events disrupted the calm, some cricket, football and occasional open fairs such as the Regent's Park's Easter Parade. Then under Tony Blair, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell simply tore up the rulebook and let in the money. Commercial activities were to be allowed. The agency could sublet parks to anyone who could pay. In came Star Trek, Red Bull, babywear shows, Frieze Art Fair, Burberry, food and fashion shows, and soon the Jubilee event sponsored by Sainsbury's. No commercial advertising in royal parks? Forget it.
Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens are now polluted with barriers, trucks, road closures, lights, sound systems, security guards, general noise and congestion. No thought is given to taste, propriety or congestion. London is getting like Moscow, a tatty city where money and power collide in mess.
London is hardly short of shopping malls, sports stadiums or music or exhibition venues. From Earls Court to Olympia, Wembley, Alexandra Palace, the O2, Excel and soon the Olympic Park, there are halls, arenas and stadiums aplenty. If Hyde Park is to join the competition, why not stage the Boat Show on the Serpentine, the Motor Show in Kensington Gardens or Formula 1 round Richmond Park? If a commercial funfair is fine for two months, why not for ever?
Most extraordinary is how little the Government makes out of all this, just ?3.2?million a year in fees, of which barely ?1.5?million is from concerts. I assumed one if not two noughts was missing from this sum. Are London's parks sacrificed for no more than this?
Nor is there any nonsense, as in New York's Central Park, of these events being free. When Boris Johnson says he “wants Madonna in Hyde Park”, he might get a complimentary seat, but for the rest of us the price is ?100.
In Hyde Park it is not just the rights of residents at issue, though even the rich might expect protection from Runway Three arriving outside their windows every summer. Some right is allowed also to the silent millions of users who do not want to buy expensive tickets, go on rides or rubberneck celebrities. They want to walk and sit peacefully on grass. They have no spokesmen and no money on their side. They have just the air, the birds and the trees, and there are no bonuses in them.
This important slice of London life has been ceded to people who seemed concerned only with money-making activity. This means seeing how much noise they can make rather than how little. Gazing at the London Fashion Week site yesterday I had to assume London's parks were run by people who could not tell a park from an industrial estate on the North Circular Road.
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Parks are meant to be for pleasure not business