In towns and cities around the UK, parks departments have seen their budgets slashed. In the city of Newcastle, this was a 90% reduction. This means that parks departments are not able to manage parks as well as they could in the past. The gates of some (parts of) parks are being closed. Other parks have been sold off or are now being managed to generate income. But this is – frankly – CRAZY when we all know of the benefits that we get from our parks and green spaces. There are several large-scale international review documents you can look at to check out the masses of research on healthy green spaces, including an extensive report by the World Health Organization. If you want to put a monetary value on it, recent work by Fields in Trust shows that parks and green spaces can save the NHS around £111 million per year, on the reduction in GP visits alone.
Traditional parks require extensive and regular management
So if these facts alone aren’t enough to make supporting our parks a duty (because CRAZILY it actually isn’t a legal duty to provide parks in our towns and cities), then let’s look at what else we can use parks for. We know that gardening and food growing are good for our physical and mental health, according to a recent review. So here’s an idea – let’s make parks places where you can grow your own!
Recent research by Jinvo Nam and me (Nicola Dempsey) shows that residents living around parks are willing to get involved in community food growing in their local park. This project focused on six Sheffield district parks and asked residents, local Friends groups and parks managers the question: how feasible and acceptable would food growing be in your local park?
When parks departments are finding it hard to keep parks feeling safe free from vandalism, increasing the numbers of people using parks, checking how well their carrots are doing could be just what our parks need. But we were initially surprised to find that parks managers were not happy to support this. They had quite understandable concerns about security and vandalism and exactly who would take on responsibility – because budget cuts mean that the local parks department could not. As land-owner, the buck ultimately lies with the parks department – and they know just how much maintenance would be required. Adding food growing into a park’s landscape would require extra hands, spades, and cash all year round – not just when the first fruit trees are planted. Along with the Friends groups, parks managers consider allotments to be the place where food growing should happen, not parks. It is very interesting that residents, many of them park users, do not see it that way.
Would he go to his local park to water his sunflower?
We were also surprised that it wasn’t just older people living around the parks who were interested in food growing in parks. We were expecting this because the over-60s tend to be the driving force in our parks’ Friends Groups. And in fact, the Friends groups that we interviewed had similar views to parks managers. But actually, residents with young families were particularly interested in getting involved in food growing in parks. This could help change the demographics of our Friends groups – making them much younger.
Do you have experience of food growing in parks? Does it work well? Or are the park managers and Friends groups we talked to right to have their concerns? Would food growing in your local park improve health and wellbeing for you and your neighbours? Would it make your park more diverse and interesting, or messy and vandalised? The place-keeping group wants to hear from you!! @placekeeping