PARK LIFE

20-07-2007

Tory councillor and Stirrer message board regular Peter Douglas Osborn warned this week that Birmingham’s parks are endangered by government house-building targets. If he wants to find a real threat to our precious green spaces, maybe he should be looking closer to home.

In The Stirrer’s weekly Birmingham Mail column, we highlight the local authority’s shocking maintenance of three city parks - Small Heath, Lightwoods in Bearwood and Ley Hill in Northfield (see the full article here)

Small Heath has a park-keeper’s lodge which has been left derelict for years despite efforts by local residents to get it turned over to community use; in Lightwoods, visitors are put at risk by poorly maintained paths; while Ley Hill is truly “a monument to municipal neglect”.

Ley Hill was The Stirrer’s childhood park.

The wonderful pitch and putt golf course has long been turned over to wilderness, but the loss of a the tennis courts is a more recent phenomenon - though not so recent to prevent it disappearing from sight beneath a jungle of foliage.

Emma Woolf, chair of Birmingham Open Spaces Forum assures me these are not isolated examples. She warns that budget cuts have left a number of parks “at the point of no return.”

She points to the chaotic maintenance system which can see be six different vans in attendance to deal with six different issues, compared to the old system when parks had their own dedicated gardener.

“Very often the people the people employed to carry out the work are only on six-week contracts anyway, so they have no long term commitment to the job”, she says.

Birmingham Council says it’s investing £20 million in parks this year - and Ley Hill will be one of the beneficiaries.

But it will take more than that to persuade many Brummies that certain showpiece parks such as Canon Hill and Sutton Park get more than their fair share of the budget - leaving less fashionable parks in less glamorous areas of the city to flounder.