Parks are back on the agenda, thanks to a BBC special. The BBC Gardeners’ World programme, to be screened on 18 August and repeated in the autumn, will be hosted by Joe Swift, who is styling himself as BBC gardening community specialist.
The programme, and a possible follow-up series next year, marks the next step in the revival of parks. The Big Lottery Fund, which launched the £140m community-based Living Landmarks scheme in June, is building on the work of the Heritage Lottery Fund, which has granted more than £400m to parks since 1996. Meanwhile, CABE is tackling the more intractable problems, such as building park workings’ skills.
Swift’s programme starts with the first public park, Birkenhead Park, and also features Oldham parks apprentices, consultant Alan Barber and New York’s Central Park, designed by FL Olmsted, who was influenced by Birkenhead. It tracks the rise and fall of parks and reveals that Britons make a total of 2.5 billion visits to them annually. Yet the BBC says 50 per cent of the UK’s 27,000 green spaces are falling into disrepair. But Barber says: “I still think we’re on a roll.” He adds: “The programme has happened not by rote but because of a lot of enthusiastic ideas in the production team.”
Swift adds: “Parks are extremely important and we’re only just starting to understand their value. They have taken a back seat for far too long.”
The power of the BBC is clear in that it can popularise a seemingly
unattractive area. The Restoration series on threatened buildings has been watched by up to 3.5 million viewers on BBC2 and is the possible template for parks series. It includes public votes, community campaigns and HLF grants.
The corporation’s real agenda is “community”, a current BBC watch-word. Swift, the son of Keeping Up Appearances actor Clive and author Margaret Drabble, says: “In terms of gardening, we’re all too interested in our own backyards.” He sees parks as one big backyard for those people who don’t have their own and as a place where communities are built, people can get fit and gardeners can learn skills.
“I think the BBC is trying to do something much bigger to culminate in an event. This is just the seeding of an idea – something I’d like to get involved in for a whole series. I find it fascinating.
“Parks have always been a bit of an afterthought. As a nation, we’re obsessed with our own gardens and the value they add to houses, but I think it’s much wider. I’ve always been in the parks as a Londoner and now my kids go to them. Parks have always been a massive part of my life but they went into decay. They ended up as grassland with park keepers just mowing them.”
Swift adds that with recent HLF investment, there is now a sense of ownership by local communities. He wants to see the day when “everyone who works in parks is a respected member of the community” but sees a “slight problem” in that commercial landscapers poach park staff:
“They’re good gardeners. It’s proper gardening as opposed to mowing, strimming and weedkilling.”
Swift, who has set up a garden shop called The Plant Room in Islington, will next present BBC Gardener of the Year and is also developing nationwide his design company, Modular Gardens. It is working with builders Laing, Barrett, David Wilson, Berkeley and Higgins “to try to improve the state of the average new-build garden and drive down the price of well-designed and built garden”. His prices are from £6,000.
“House-builders are only interested in money, but if they could understand the value of gardens… everyone else is starting to understand that well-designed gardens help house prices and improve the state of neighbourhoods.
'Noddy house' developers can leave six inches of poor quality topsoil and not even a fence – sometimes just a bit of string around the garden,” says Swift.
“We should pressure the Government so that at least the builders have to do a little planting in each garden, including a tree. It should be the same as a standard bathroom or kitchen.”
On TV gardening, Swift says producers are “moving away from our own backyard” into “more community and society-based” programmes. He is sure to be at the forefront of that change.
Matthew Appleby
