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.
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