#70: Parklife

 

Ducketts Common (a rather flattering shot)

Ducketts Common lies opposite Turnpike Lane tube station in north London. Calling it an ‘oasis’ or ‘green lung’ would be stretching it; the common is only 24,000 m² (smaller than most parks) and is bordered by the wide and noisy Green Lanes as it takes over from Wood Green High Road.

Park life

I’d always thought of it as a bit scrubby and barren, but jogging round it on a few occasions recently I found a surprising amount going on, and a revitalised space for which Haringey Council and the Friends of Ducketts Common must presumably take some credit. On Sunday a rap soundtrack and the smack of ball on tarmac came from the basketball courts (black, brown and white players together, a miniature antidote to the riots that have been filling the media lately). Elsewhere, a group of Middle Eastern- or Turkish-looking men were sitting on the grass in a circle around a pile of cash playing cards, and a little girl ran next to me as far as the playground gates (‘Is she bothering you?’ asked her father).

You can see thoughtful touches – the chunky logs placed around the perimeter (good for sitting on, running along, or trying to balance on for a Simone Biles impression). Half the park is ‘a wildlife area’, and the council's website mentions a 'wildflower meadow', which is somewhat creative with the truth, but the pigeons bathing and preening in a puddle didn’t mind. The outdoor gym was seeing some use and there were even some sunbathers.

The next day, Monday, the park had a different feel – fewer people on the benches and grass, some on work breaks and some perhaps not, Rizla papers and beer cans much in evidence. Litter had built up by Tuesday and I was not that impressed seeing someone urinating against a tree as I jogged past.

Use of London parks – the figures

So what are the figures on London park usage? How many people use them, and for what? Have visits to parks increased recently? I can find no statistics about visits to Ducketts Common itself from Haringey Council’s latest management report. However, a 2017 Yougov poll based on a survey of just over 1000 Londoners showed that 10% visit a park or green space every day, and 48% at least once a week. Only 9% never visit them.

More broadly, recent government figures show about 50% of people in England had visited urban parks, fields or playgrounds in the previous month, based on surveys of about 6000 people each quarter between April 2020-December 2023. This figure had remained stable since July 2020. (Strangely I could see no effect of lockdown on visits, though 4% fewer people visited between April and June 2020). According to these figures, urban green spaces were visited by about 20% more people than other natural spaces such as beaches, woodland and countryside.

What do people do in parks?

I couldn’t find any figures for what people do in parks, but according to these government figures by far the most popular activity in all green spaces (including other spaces such as beaches, mountains and rivers) was walking (including dog walking), with 71% of people surveyed saying they did this. Next most popular was wildlife watching (25%), followed by picnicking (14%) and playing with children (12%).

The personalities of parks

In my experience parks have varied characters, just like neighbourhoods. I’ve just visited Bushy Park near Hampton Court, which has wide tree-lined avenues, and abundant bracken which provides cover for the baby deer born each year. A far cry from Ducketts Common in size and landscape, but all part of what makes London a comparatively green city.

A red deer feeding in a river in Bushy Park

#69: Write Cut Rewrite exhibition

 

Write Cut Rewrite exhibition
Photo: Ian Wallman

‘Kill your darlings,’ enjoined Stephen King, advising writers to cut words which may have taken hours to develop. This exhibition of writers’ editing processes at the Bodleian’s Weston Library gives evidence of such murder through manuscripts, jottings and notebooks.

So what ‘darlings’ do we see here? Opening the exhibition is a twelfth century manuscript, The Ormulum, commenting on the Bible in early English. This is a literal cut and paste – one page trimmed to a third of its size, overlying another with almost every line heavily scored through. ‘For a notebook which is almost a thousand years old it looks surprisingly modern because it features so many crossed-out passages,’ says the label.

Yet why do crossed out passages look more modern than the finished product? Because they show a common human impulse to revise, with its hesitancy and changes of mind, in a way that the fixed final text does not? Doodles in Shelley’s notebook, displayed here, also seem strangely modern. Perhaps it is use of the pen rather than fixed type which makes them seem more human?

Also included are three wonderful sheets of witty lines kept in reserve by Raymond Chandler for his detective novels, ticked off in pencil after being used. Unused was ‘I left her with her virtue intact, but it was a struggle. She nearly won.’ I can imagine that in The Big Sleep. Another aide memoire is Philip Pullman’s list of Oxford colleges and the names he called them in his children’s books, e.g. All Souls becomes St Scholastica.

A list of witty lines kept by Raymond Chandler

Editing materials are important. Unlined notebooks show poet’s Alice Oswald swirling coloured sketches which she then tries to translate into words. Le Carré‘s drafts are handwritten, then typed up, then the typescript is cut up again and stapled between further handwritten parts. Fans of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy can read a highly edited, handwritten opening in which Ricki Tarr tracks down fellow ex-spy Jim Prideaux to a school where he is teaching. But in the final book, they never meet. This is one ‘darling’ which was killed.

Sometimes little is edited – Alexander Pope’s Essay on Criticism has one A3 sized manuscript page with just one correction. Were his robust rhyming couplets a confident guide, so little revision was needed? One can also see him underlining words (which would be italicised in a modern addition), bringing out the oral qualities, like a musical score.

Pope's Essay on Criticism – left-hand page corrected, right hand page hardly at all

Pope's Essay on Criticism – left-hand page corrected, right hand page hardly at all

Electronic editing

And what of today’s untraceable electronic editing? This is covered by a digital display with ‘Cuttings’, a poem by Fanny Choi, where one can track the electronic editing process – ‘every keystroke, every pause, every typo, every half-developed idea later abandoned’.

Before going to the exhibition I had wondered whether a museum, which must preserve objects and halt time, could convey any of the fluency or even urgency of the editing process. It turns out that it can.

Corrections to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

‘Write Cut Rewrite’ is at the Weston Library, Oxford, until 5 January 2025.