Hammersmith Study Group: Exhibition: Ravenscourt Park (1970)

There should of course be an obvious answer to the question of what constitutes a park. Summer’s faded into a distant memory, so it’s a good time to take stock, with a season of site visits, reviews of virtual CGI, and actual wooden models of new developments in full swing, showing the newly alluring sunlit ‘park’ images, here in our mid-winter. So far, these suggest that many a developer has rather different idea to us, but perhaps it’s just a naming thing.

Celebrating our parks

Without even considering Wormwood Scrubs, we have several wonderful parks in H&F, the largest of which – Ravenscourt and Bishop’s Parks – provide for almost every conceivable outdoor leisure need, even including exhibitions and Laser shows. From basketball nets in the north to a paddling pool in south, taking in sufficient space to play several team games – of football or cricket – in the middle, tennis courts, toddlers playgrounds, dog exercise areas north and south, popular all-weather football pitches adjacent, and greenhouses and community gardening alongside.  Even a renovated and listed Tea House.  And that’s just Ravenscourt Park. 

Beckett Wharf park

Bishop’s Park has a Grade I listed palace adjacent, the river and riverwalk too.  This gives us a pretty comprehensive idea of the purposes of a park.  We even have possibly the world’s smallest park, Beckett Wharf Park, between the bridge and Riverside Studios. One of our members has recently worked with Kier Construction to renovate it as part of a community contribution.

Ravenscourt Park, November 2023

The Open Spaces Society, to which we’re affiliated, noted recently that parks are under unprecedented pressure from commercial activities, and we see a little of that here with fairs, concerts and so on, but those are modest by comparison with say, Hyde Park, where a good part is cordoned off for most of the summer for the huge ‘BST’ outdoor concerts. Even so, some damage occurs as the photo adjacent shows.

Lewis Cubitt park

New parks

Perhaps we’ll get a better feel for the modern take on a ‘park’ or open space by looking at recent developments? Kings Cross seems a reasonable place to start, with the possibility to do what it likes with public spaces and presumably with few budgetary constraints. The ‘park’ shown adjacent is about the size of a communal garden of the type you might find in Notting Hill, the difference being that this is expected to be shared by a thousand or more people, the original by perhaps a hundred or two. There is perhaps no coincidence that the name of this example is connected to one of the great 18th century builders, Cubitt, rather than a name we might choose, say, Capability Brown.

A review of some proposed new developments we’ve looked at might help.  We don’t have to go far for CGI proposals, and to compare then with some recently built. Mayoral Opportunity Areas, notably Old Oak and it’s environs provide good hunting grounds, in addition to those actually in the borough.  The evidence suggests that developers, rather than producing fanciful CGI’s, might perhaps go and visit some of the many Victorian and Edwardian parks around us to see what they do, and what their public values might reasonably look like.

Earls Court: CGI proposed ‘park’

Westfield Residential: CGI (under construction)

The Grand Union (Alperton – 2023)

The Grand Union (Alperton – 2023)

HS2 Old Oak CGI ‘Parkland’

Original CGI for ‘Old Oak park’

Which one of these new developments has the space to play a team game of some sort or an individual game of tennis? Or any of the other activities listed above? Perhaps one.

Increasing physical activity must be a central part of everything we do

While the Mayor of London, responsible for planning these Opportunity Areas, talks endlessly of ‘active lifestyles’, ‘active travel’, ‘healthy streets’, and the ‘obesity crisis’ with statements such as Increasing physical activity must be a central part of everything we do, what he oversees, or in the case of the Grand Union development above, financially underpins, are entirely passive open spaces.  A great deal of hard landscaping has been planned, and no small amount of money spent on carefully carved granite, in order to prevent any form of activity at all, in this self-styled ‘Manhattan’ development of… Alperton!  On the plus side, the (200 year old) canal is planned to offer kayaking – hooray!  In this specific development though, the summer 2023 offering was ‘Cinema and Wimbledon Screenings’, both entirely passive sedentary activities.  Hammersmith BID of course does some of the same on the hard landscape of Lyric Square, but wouldn’t think of taking up space in one of our actual parks.

Dare we suggest that the reason these spaces are often so heavily ‘designed’ and landscaped to look as they do, is to sell the flats that surround them, to offer a sort of communal space to compensate for the private outside space only offered in the form of the de-minimis 5 sqm of balcony required by the London Plan?  This is where new residents have the imagination of outdoor family life squeezed out of them by developers with equally truncated imaginations, stretching to the idea of a gym in which to exercise in a bubble – headphones on. The mandated car-free aspect of such developments at least doesn’t facilitate the absurd and largely North American notion of driving frenetically to the gym, in order to run on the spot.

Maybe it really is just a naming issue? Call them what they are – public gardens – and signpost the nearest actual park, even if it’s a mile away. But developers regularly like to convince us is that they’re really building ‘parks’  and name them so, because research tells them that’s what we want, and we’re underserved.

CPRE says that London has half the green space it should have per head of population, and it’s quite an acute problem in some parts of H&F – we want parks for good reason. While Westfield Residential, with its thousands of flats mentions ‘park’ half a dozen times in the Design & Access statement part 1 (of 6), and over twenty times in part 2, the development that really stands out in this respect is Earls Court of course, where’s there’s nothing remotely like a park for a mile or two… unless you count Brompton cemetery. 

And there’s the rub – several people commenting on the Earls Court master plan’s ‘park’ said they’d prefer to spend time in the cemetery. But pride of place in the naming department goes to Kings Road Park. Where’s that? The former Fulham gas works, latterly British Gas London Research Station in Imperial Road, home of 70’s Sweeney car chases, and complete with the world’s oldest surviving gas holder. This is another self-proclaimed ‘Manhattan’ with more green on the roofs than available in the ‘park’ for the 1800 flat-dwellers. With phase 1 ‘sold out’, perhaps this really is what we want?

Surely we must be storing up buyer’s remorse by not providing actual parks? The Victorians still seem to have something to teach us.