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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