If you're using your park and you value it, then start campaigning to keep it

Parks have served as oases during lockdown, but lack of funding from local councils means they are under threat. If we don’t do something now, they may not be around for the next pandemic

Going to the park this weekend? You may be among, what, millions? Despite Boris Johnson’s standing in front of a board, dribbling a bit, and lowering the national risk level – surely just another piece of theatre from a cut rate Barnum whose act is wearing very thin – much of Britain remains shut down.

The shops are mostly open, but there are no cinemas, restaurants, pubs, or bars – at least for the moment – and with another frustrating weekend underway. There are no theatres, no live music, no sports that you can attend in person.

Against this backdrop, parks have served as oases, places where we can escape the confines of the four walls that surround us and have been closing in on all too many of us the longer the lockdown has gone on.

They are happy places. They are safe(ish) places. There’s sufficient space to socially distance. The rules aren’t always observed. The unwillingness of the able bodied to give me any space at all as a wheelchair user has at times been infuriating. But the risks are lowered out of doors, and I’ve had the plague anyway, so it could be worse.

Parks were even open when the lockdown was at its height, I was coughing my guts up and those that weren’t were only allowed to go out the front door to pick up supplies, or work (if they were key workers) or to make use of them for the purpose of exercise.

The reason I’m writing is that they are under threat as a result of the parlous financial state of many local councils, an issue I explored in an extended feature for Independent Premium last year.

This has not been high on the agenda recently, for obvious reasons, but that may soon change. Sadly, when local authorities are forced to swing the axe, parks are often among the things to get hit first because they’re maintained through discretionary spending. They are not considered as essential services. Even though they are.

There was a spell when I was young when the local “rec” was a litter filled mess that you took care to visit only when there were plenty of people around. That changed as things took a turn for the better, that is until the pre-Brexit Tory Party project to muck up Britain settled upon austerity as the best way to achieve its aim.

They’ve been in decline ever since and some may not survive. Imagine your local open space with a heavyweight piece of chain and a padlock on the gate, plus a sign saying closed by order of PriceWaterhouse, EY, Deloitte & KPMG, administrators to Holchester District Council (in liquidation).

It’s an especially unpleasant thought for the millions of us living in cities, where accommodation is more cramped, and gardens are a luxury available to a fortunate few.

Now consider that the coronavirus pandemic is not the last we will experience. This is not me playing the role of Jeremiah, or the Indy’s resident misanthrope (as one spluttering correspondent once described me). It’s simply scientific fact. Somewhere, in some creature, possibly a bat, but maybe something else, a microorganism is lurking. It might be another coronavirus. It might be a virulent new form of flu. It might be something scarier still.

It might come from China, but China is hardly the only place where the environment is being sacrificed on the altar of unsustainable development.

At some point it’s going to hop, skip and jump across the species barrier just as our current unwanted viral pal did last year.

Maybe the government will be better prepared for the next one, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Relying on Britain’s politicians, bureaucrats and the other structures that this latest affair has brutally exposed is a bit like putting your faith in a rusty old Vauxhall Astra with flaky transmission and an engine waiting for the most inconvenient moment to go kaboom. We may have to do this again.

The value of parks, as community assets, was clear to some of us even before the pandemic hit. It will count as a rare positive to have come from the past few months if our numbers now increase.

So get ready for a fight to protect your local park because you’ll miss it when it’s gone. It’s a good fight to be involved in, and it’s winnable if we start work now.