Categories: buildings-and-cities
Tags: urbanwalks
Date: 26 February 2007 00:38:27
... and I walked from Peckham through Camberwell up to Walworth after church today, ending up in one of the exvaginations of the Protean Burgess Park. Planted crocuses and daffodils are in bloom, as are the first of the rose-family street trees (some kind of cherry I think - I was too nice to pick any of them and look closely enough to i.d. them)
Photos tomorrow if I remember. Despite the so-called Broadband, uploading pictures is still a lot easier from work than from home.
Burgess Park is a really odd place because it isn't a park at all. Or wasn't. It is a collection of parcels of land - some genuine parks, old playgrounds, a couple of rather elegant squares, some never-rebuilt bombsites, reclaimed industrial brownfield, and 1960s and 70s slum clearance, all vaguely linked together by the course of the western arm of the old Surrey Canal, and joined into a virtual park two or three decades ago by some lines on a Southwark Council plan.
Its a legacy of the days when "Inner City" meant blight and decline and local government thought it was their job to demolish houses, get the population density down, and move the people out to shiny new estates in the middle of nowhere. By the 1980s that idea was obvious nonsense in south London, land was in demand again, people were clamouring to move back in, and slums were being sold to the sons of stockbrokers for more money than their previous inhabitants had earned in their lives. But the officials managing the council planning departments had been trained in the 40s and 50s, and still thought that private rented housing was the enemy. They had also seen what had happened to the high rise blocks in the 60s and 70s and realised that that wasn't the answer. So in Southwark they
At the time I thought it was a crap idea. If I'd been the Dictator of South London I'd have laid 90% of Burgess Park out for streets and built three-story terraced houses. (Still the highest-density livable family housing we can tolerate in our culture - I have seen the future and it looks like Haringey) When we lived in Nunhead it made a convenient route for cycling around without having to play with the traffic - up the old canal from where Peckham Library is now then left to Walworth road, or right to Old Kent Road, or try to get over Albany Way to get lost in the Aylesbury Estate. But most of "Burgess Park" was pretty much wasteland - but not pretty wasteland. These days its a lot better. Trees have grown, some leisure facilities built, people are using the park. It still might have been better if they had rebuilt some or all of the demolished streets, but it seems to be working. Sort-of.
And there are pretty flowers. As well as lots of pigeons.