NORTHERNHAY OPEN TO THE PUBLIC, EXETER, 2025.

 Tomorrow the citizens of Exeter and visitors to Exeter will be permitted to walk in the Northernhay Gardens again.  The gates have been locked for the last seventy days, only being opened when the temporary owners of the people's park were ready and able to 'entertain' the many funfair-friendly.  Many of those seventy days the Gardens were a 'construction site' where none but members of the incomer workforce were permitted to enter even if wearing a hard hat.

It is a scanadalous irony that the overweight Mayor of Exeter and other civic dignitaries dressed up and marched in procession to the Gardens to set down their poppy wreaths with all due ceremony, solemnity, dignity and maybe a little pomposity, to confirm to the city and the world that 'we shall remember' the city's and the county's dead, this on Remembrance Sunday, only to lock the gates against the citizens before dawn on Remembrance Monday so that no-one could visit the memorial, except after weeks of 'construction' when they were allowed in to the overwhelming funfair to find Exeter's fine memorial closely guarded by plastic santas and rudolfs &c.

Seventy days is practically a fifth of a year and by the end of this year the Council will probably have closed the Gardens again; perhaps another street-food 'fest' (not on a street!) to take the bread out of the mouths of local traders.  These closures do the Gardens no good!  The damage done is heart-rending.  Exeter City Council lives up to its long-standing reputation as a gang of Philistines.

What's to be done?  The City, no doubt, needs a space for such 'events'  but not Northernhay which is the jewel in Exeter's crown.  Such events require hard-standing. The Castle Yard was once the place for balloon-ascents and other such jollities but, alas!, the Council has sold it.  There must be an answer!

(And, incidentally, I hold this conspiracy theory:  I suspect that the reason why the path through the Castle wall between Northernhay and Rougemont Gardens has not been opened for the last five years is merely because the City Council likes to lock whenever, wherever, whatever it can and because this closure makes it easier for damaging, polluting, lowest-common-denominator 'events' to be inflicted on Northernhay.   I suspect the whole 'unsafe walls' narrative might be fake news.)

This blocked passage between the Gardens is an injury and a reproach to the city. What is sad is that there is a failure of imagination when it comes to a unified Northernhay and Rougemont Gardens.  With the ancient castle walls and moats and the magnificent trees and the glorious lie of the land they really are a remarkable asset   No other city has anything like them.  

In today's Britain, gardens can be powerful magnets.  Already many people visit Exeter hoping to enjoy the Gardens. (and many were disappointed throughout the past 70 days).  If Northernhay were gardened and advertised as an attraction (A public garden since William Shakespeare was writing!)  ("The most romantic walk in all Europe!" as The Western Times was once able to claim) they would add to the reputation of the city and bring many thousands of visitors to Exeter of the kind who spend money freely on the High Street.  If the Council needs cash and the people need circuses there must be nobler ways to make money and to entertain the children than to trample Northernhay.  

A PRETTY GOOD DOSE OF PATRONAGE, EXETER, 1844.

The Western Times of  6th April 1844 set out, not for the first time,  to inform its readers that Henry Phillpotts, the Bishop of Exeter, (Exeter was then the seat of the bishop for Devon and Cornwall), was a decidedly worldly Christian:

     "....we beg to remind our readers , and the admirers and friends of Bishop Philpotts in particular, that admitting the efficacy of his prelatical labours they have been fitful in the extreme, when compared with his steady labours to reward & exalt the pious and exemplary members of his own family. 

" Lowe, it will be remembered, received the lucrative post of Precentor, on the nomination of Bishop Philpotts, and Bishop Philpott's son immediately stepped into two fat livings which Precentor Lowe had vacated.

"Nephew Philpott's hath a valuable living in Cornwall.

"Son Philpotts hath Stokeinteighnhead, and is also Precentor of Exeter Cathedral/

"Son-in-law Stephens is Sub-Dean and Vicar of Dunsford, and Son-in-law de Bouilli hath also the valuable living of Lawhitton.

"Here is a pretty good dose of patronage for people all talking about the primitive church, and declaring that we must recede more and more towards the primitive simplicity of the early Christian church.""  

The patronage continued far beyond 1844. It was the Cornish socialist historian, A.L. Rowse,   (A Cornish Childhood,  Jonathan Cape, 1943) who best summed up Phillpotts when he wrote that he was: "a nauseating character....a nasty political pamphleteer who recommended himself thus for ecclesiastical propmotion to the Tory reactionaries of before the Reform Bill, who recommended himself still more by marrying Lord Eldon's niece, a grabber of every scrap of church preferment he could lay hands on to serve his family -  he had seven sons in Orders and almost as many sons-in-law;  who kept clear of his cathedral city the whole time of the cholera, an oppressor of the poor, who built himself a fine marine villa at Torquay (now the Palace Hotel), from which he administered his diocese and went up to London to speak in the House of Lords on behalf of every bad cause." 

It is said that, when in the House, Phillpotts fulminated against every reform of the age in a manner that shocked even his fellow diehards and that when in his diocese, in the name of reform, he put fear rather than love into the hearts of his clergy.

The Times here consistently misspelled Phillpott's name. Perhaps they only did it to annoy because they knew it teased.

We still have nauseating bishops and we have 26 bishops in the House of Lords -   Lords spiritual, but not very!