NORTHERNHAY GARDENS: DOGS WELCOME, PART TWO. EXETER, 2024.

 "LIVE MUSIC,  DOGS WELCOME,  STREET FOOD FESTIVAL THIS WEEKEND!,  FREE ENTRY!,  OVER  20 FOOD STALLS,"

Street food in the City's uniquely potentially beautiful Gardens!  Live 'music' thump-thumping, destroying the peace of a sunny, June weekend in Exeter!  Free entry for dogs, but dogs have enjoyed free entrance to Norny for over 600 years!  Free entry for citizens and visitors and these have enjoyed free entry since Shakespeare was alive and drinking at The Mermaid but on Sunday, not free entry for a neighbour of mine.

I was witness to an interesting confrontation inside the southern gates of Northernhay Gardens.  The leader of the food festival's security squad was confronting a neighbour of mine eyeball to eyeball and refusing him entry to the Gardens.  Behind him, like an extended back-row, were eight of the security band.  It was a stand-off, with the neighbour claiming his right to enter and the leader of the squad  claiming his right to eject.  There was bad feeling and worse language on both sides.  My neighbour was being refused entry not because he was carrying a weapon but because he was clearly tipsy,  hardly a reason considering the food festival beer tent was dishing out alcohol to every man , woman and, perhaps, child and dog in the Gardens,  and because he had been abusive,  but the abuse was directed at the security squad itself and at the bag-checkers whom he had not expected to bar his entrance.  

The whole spectacle was not very edifying and, if I may say so, decidedly un-British.

Worse was to come,  My neighbour stood his ground and, inebriate or not, his arguments seemed lucid and informed.   All he wanted to do was to walk up the maple-tree avenue, find his wife and walk her home to dinner;  he was sure of his rights.  The security-chief was sure of his right to force my neighbour to leave the Gardens.  He sent for the police.

Five very young men and a woman,  policepeople, arrived with an alacrity that amazed me.  It is sometimes said the Exeter police are very slow responding to trouble in the Gardens but not on this occasion.  

Imagine this!  There were now 15 (fifteen!) policepeople or would-be policepeople engaging one Exonian who had comitted no offence, if you except a few playful insults, and who wanted to enter the Gardens. The police, it seemed to me, were not there to try to calm the situation nor yet to take an objective look at what was happening here.  They were certainly not looking for compromise.  They were there, short and simple, to support the incomers, the City Council's renters, and kick this troublesome Exonian inebriate, who stood before them like Horatius on the bridge, out of the Gardens. 

I was struck by the fact that not one of the police recognised my truculent, anti-establishment neighbour.  He is quite a character and has made his mark in the city.  I dared to wonder whether they had spent too much time sitting in cars and talking to portable telephones.  So much, I thought, for local policing!

There was fierce talk of arrest and such matters but at this point my neighbour's wife arrived and did what the 'authorities' had failed to do.  She forcibly waltzed him off home to dinner and left the fifteen uniformed lawmen looking somewhat nonplussed, mouths agape, that sort of thing.

Why, you ask, have I told this petty story?   Well, the main reason is that this incident has led me, once again to consider the uneven balance between Exeter City Council's rights and its responsibilities with regard to Northernhay Gardens, a subject I mean to address once again at  some date in the future.

   

  

NORTHERNHAY GARDENS, DOGS WELCOME, PART ONE. EXETER, 2024..

 Last weekend a street food 'festival' came to Exeter.  One might expect that a street food festival should take place down a street, Fore Street perhaps, but no!  The organisers, not local people, had been handed the keys to the gates of Northernhay Gardens by our City Council.  The Council likes to encourage such 'events' (the Government encourages them too).  The Council managed to cut the turf for the occasion. 

On the Thursday I met two of the food festival organisers, Tudor and Holly.   They were ready to offer me,  as someone residing near the park, beer, this was ironic in view of later events, and street-food gratis.  I was assured that the gates would not be locked and that there would be free access to all for the weekend.  I did not try to claim my sweeteners but the two assurances turned out to be lies.

The next morning the glorious, still unpainted by the Council, Victorian, wrought-iron gates to the Gardens were plasticuffed with aesthetically, in my opinion, displeasing signs. One read  that the gates would be locked and it apologised for 'any inconvenience' &c.  Another read:   LIVE MUSIC,  DOGS WELCOME,  STREET FOOD FESTIVAL THIS WEEKEND!  FREE ENTRY,  OVER 20 FOOD STALLS.  The gates were locked throughout Friday and again on the Monday.

Well, let us start with the live music: there is a fundamental difference between concerts which , however, intrusive, have their term and music (or the cries of dinosaurs) which takes over  the whole of Saturday and Sunday.  For a street food festival it was apparently necessary to play  lowest-common-denominator 'music' amplified to such levels of sound that the Gardens and their surroundings were distressing to residents like myself, and the police might have been asked to deal with what was, by definition, anti-social behaviour,  but, as we all know and as we shall see later,  the 'local' police were included in the thirty pieces of silver, they came with the keys to the Gardens.  

At the gates to the Gardens there was a security check:  This must the first time since Jacobean times that visitors to the Gardens have had their bags rummaged.

THERE WAS A BAG-CHECK TO PERMIT CITIZENS OF EXETER AND OTHERS TO VISIT  NORTHERNHAY GARDENS!!!!   

Our forebears must have turned in their graves but the food-festival organisers were taking security seriously.  No-one was to come into the Gardens without first demonstrating they were clean.   There was a team of security men and women as numerous as an infantry section.  I counted ten but there must have been more.  These were not Exonions, they were recruited, like the Black and Tans, of people without local connection.  I think they mostly came from Wales.   They were commanded by a stocky ex. Royal Welch Fusilier.  

I struggle to understand why security men were there at all, and so many!  Bad things happen everywhere, but in Exeter, at the weekend when every corner of the city is crowded with people, to mount security guards in Northernhay Gardens!   

I suppose it would have made some sense  to search people on the way out.  There might have been desperate thieves stealing vegan sausages.  

The good people of Exeter, conditioned for years to tolerate the intolerable, queued to enter and to demonstrate that they had no bombs, knives, grenades, vitriol  &c. without a word of reproach.    All, as far as I know, was good humour with lots of joking and laughter.   No-one, as far as I could see, beside myself, felt that the bag-check and the dozen or so security men were ridiculously over the top.

But what, you ask, about the dogs being welcome?   Well, they were welcome but a neighbour of mine was not..  He was treated worse than a dog and I shall deal with that in PART 2.