I am publishing these two posts again because the gates to Northernhay Gardens are once again locked against the people of Exeter for whose recreation the gardens have existed for four hundred years.
The Council of our glorious city have already given the keys to the same people who damaged the park last Christmas. It will be locked until 18th November. (25 days!) What incredible arrogance!
Remembrance Sunday will again be celebrated by Semper Fidelis, if permitted by the key-holders, on a building site.
After 18th November until the New Year, it will be open to the public only as and when the Fairground Providers wish. It will not again be the Gardens as they should be until after the New Year.
Even then it will be closed to the public for many more days while the Fairground people seek to restore the damage that will inevitably be done.
O EXETER!
1. THE RAPE OF NORTHERNHAY. 26th SEPTEMBER 2022.
So, rumour has it, there is to be a repeat of 'Winter Wonderland' in Exeter's unique Northernhay Gardens. I would not be surprised! The city-council appears not to have a ha'porth of imagination. The scars of the last 'wonderland' have not yet healed.
Last year the park was turned into a construction site. It was closed, effectively, to the people who
appreciate it as a public park for seventy-two days and later closed again in favour of the great lizards.
Last year Exeter's Remembrance Sunday was, somewhat farcically, observed, by kind permission of the winter wonderlanders, at the edge of a half-constructed funfair. (The county's remembrance in the cathedral-close was not much more dignified. It was tainted by the booths of the sons of Mammon, - but that's a separate issue!)
The governors of Devon's county-town seems to have a hankering for the lowest-common-denominator. Exeter, the city, not the suburbs where the councillors live, has many advantages. A castle famed in story, pleasing city walls, a most ancient guildhall, where now the homeless lay their weary heads, a grand Victorian museum (ditto), catacombs with neglected potential, underground passages, a brilliant riverside - more potential there! though the Quay is one thing that has been well done, a green belt where funfairs and circuses could hold sway and do no harm, (although some attraction less short-term would make more sense .) and the one glorious valley-park, miraculously preserved to the people, which is Northernhay, and which for at least three months of the year is being consistently denied to the people whose free inheritance it is and to visitors to our city.
The Gardens are becoming shabbier and shabbier because of lack of intelligent management and common-sense policing. (They no longer have a dedicated manager nor a dedicated team of gardeners. - and dedication is what is sorely needed!)
Their future calls for some deep-thought and the Council's new games of neglecting them as gardens, using them as a site for vulgar amusement, limiting access wherever possible, wiring off footpaths and installing, very costly no doubt, close-circuit television cameras are not going to help.
2. PLASTIC DINOSAURS, 26th MAY 2022.
The time-honoured Northernhay Gardens, as I write, are full of plastic dinosaurs. Until June 16th the Gardens will be closed to the public except for those times the Amusement Company from Essex which has brought the plastic dinosaurs to Exeter, chooses to open them and no member of the public will be permitted to walk in the Gardens without paying.
These Gardens are exceptional. They are a remarkable inheritance, a remarkable survival. We are so lucky to have them! They are not just any park. They could make the city of Exeter celebrated far and wide. Together with Rougemont they offer the most wonderful 'castle walk'. Properly gardened and cared for they would attract visitors from all over the country and beyond. They are also the place, the 'Valhalla', where Exeter remembers those Exonians who died in war and those men whose philanthropy benefitted the city. They are simply much too precious to be closed to the public and farmed out to 'Amusement Companies'.
A similar constraint of the traditional liberties of the people took place at Christmas/New Year 2021/2022, when the park was for seventy-two days transformed from it's traditional ideal, viz. a charming walk for weary citizens and a playground for the young, to become an unprepossessing funfair. The shocking fact is that for a quarter of the last twelvemonth the Gardens qua gardens will have been inaccessible to the public.
It used to be accepted that the Gardens were one of the city's glories. Visitors, including monarchs, were invited to admire the wonderful 'Grove' which thoughtful, famous gardeners and responsible city government maintained and improved.
Both these new, undignified, commercial initiatives, the dinosaurs and the funfair, break new ground. For more than four centuries, with negligible and largely benign exceptions, the Gardens have been freely accessible to citizens of, and visitors to, Exeter. Once they were described as perhaps being : "the most romantic walk in Europe." Alas, no more!
The Exeter City Council, which cable-ties its notices to the Gardens' proud Victorian ironwork gates but which never gets around to giving them a lick of paint, appears to have the right to close the Gardens to the public whenever it chooses for whatever purpose. This would seem to be the law and, in this, the law would seem to be an ass!
The Council's responsibilities to the Gardens; on the other hand, are not being met. The reputed 'danger' from the 'unsafe' castle walls has not been tackled in three years, ugly steel fencing is everywhere, the statues need repairs and cleaning, the plants and trees are sadly neglected, nothing is planted, the bandstand is unpainted and unused, the noticeboards carry ludicrously out-of-date notices, the 'maps' have been vandalised, access to Rougemont Gardens is blocked, the park is crying out for good designers, for good gardeners, for good management.
The distressing anti-social behaviour in the Gardens is not controlled: litter lies for days on the lawns, grafitti regularly appear on the monuments, including the castle walls, radios are played at high volume and unsocial hours, the homeless sleep beneath the trees, 'disturbed' citizens 'act out' and do unchecked damage, there are nefarious (often criminal) midnight practices, of which the City Council is well aware. Nothing of this is being controlled or dealt with. The Gardens are not policed. The regulations that exist are simply not enforced.
The 'events' will, of course, be hailed as a success. Nearly everybody loves a funfair (as do I) and there is no harm in a few plastic dinosaurs fom Essex. Little children with happy faces will jump all over the Gardens and the Amusers and the Council will make money. But why Northernhay? What a short-term betrayal of the generous traditions of four hundred years of a glorious and free (but controlled) public space! What a betrayal of the philanthropic ideals of our ancestors! What a dumbing-down by a once great and dignified city of a unique inheritance!
This abuse of the Gardens is likely to continue, so too the neglect. The failure, as so often with Exeter councils, lies in lack of imagination. Can this council really find no way to improve the Gardens? Must they become shabbier and shabbier? Can the Council conjure up no better way to entertain children and to put a few ducats in the coffers than in the locking-up and degradation of Northernhay? Must we really reconcile ourselves to witnessing a whittling away of the traditional liberties of the people and a neglect of the potential of an exceptionally beautiful site of considerable historic interest?
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