On the park that is not Regent’s Park, will never be Regent’s Park, and is better for not trying to be
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat — Harper-Thames on East London parks and green space.
Haggerston Park is not the kind of park that appears in London travel guides. It is not picturesque. It does not have a boating lake or a famous rose garden or a view of anything except itself and the surrounding buildings, which are the surrounding buildings of Haggerston, which is not a neighbourhood that is trying to be photographed. And yet it is, in my experience of it over several years of living nearby, exactly what a park should be: used constantly by the people who live near it, genuinely serving its actual function rather than performing for visitors, and entirely unpretentious about what it is, which is a piece of green in a part of the city that needs one.
The Users
The users of Haggerston Park are the neighbourhood. The children from the estates that border it. The dog walkers at every hour. The teenagers who occupy the benches with the focused intensity of people doing very important nothing. The old men who play chess at the tables near the paths on weekend mornings, which I find almost unbearably charming and which is, I am aware, a very particular response to chess in a park. The mothers with pushchairs doing the loop that means you can walk without going anywhere. The runners who are using the park as a circuit because it is there and the streets are full of cyclists. All of them, here, in this specific place, because it is the park they have.
In All Weathers
I walk in Haggerston Park in all weathers because I have come to believe that weather is not a reason not to go outside, it is merely a description of what outside is like today. The park in rain is completely different from the park in sun and both are completely different from the park in the low yellow light of an October afternoon, and all of them are worth being in because being outside in a green space, regardless of the conditions, is one of the things that makes living in a city workable rather than merely tolerable. Parks exist because cities know what they are, which is a very large amount of stone and glass and concrete and human density, and parks are the acknowledgment that this is not quite enough on its own.
The Argument for the Imperfect Park
I prefer Haggerston Park to better parks, by which I mean parks that are more beautiful, more designed, more photographed. The better parks are destinations. Haggerston Park is infrastructure. The distinction matters because infrastructure is what you use daily and destinations are what you visit occasionally, and the daily use of a park is what makes a neighbourhood liveable in a way that the occasional visit to a beautiful one does not. I can walk to Haggerston Park in four minutes. I cannot walk to Regent’s Park in four minutes. The four-minute park wins the comparison that matters, which is the comparison of what I actually use rather than what I am glad exists.
A Final Word
If you live near an imperfect park and you use it regularly, you understand what I am describing. If you live near a beautiful park and use it occasionally, I am suggesting you recalibrate the metric. The park that is used daily by the people who live around it is doing exactly what a park should do, and doing it more completely than the park that is visited by people who came specifically to see it. Haggerston Park is doing its job. I go there three or four times a week and it is doing it every time.
For more from Harper-Thames on East London and its green spaces, visit Harper-Thames. More on London parks at Time Out London.
Haggerston Park has, in the years I have been using it, become one of the fixed points of my week in the way that only things you return to constantly become fixed points. The park does not change much; I change more than it does. But I notice that I notice different things in it at different times of year and in different states of mind, which means the park is not the constant and I am not the variable but rather both of us are in motion and the relationship between us is what produces the experience. This is, I suspect, what all long-term relationships with places are: not a fixed experience of a fixed place but an ongoing negotiation between what the place offers and what you bring to it.
I want to add one more thing about Haggerston Park, which is the lighting in winter. On clear days between November and February, the low sun comes through the trees at an angle that is specific to that time of year and that location, and it turns the park into something that looks like a painting of a park rather than the park itself: very golden, very still, slightly too beautiful to be real. I have taken photographs of it that do not capture it. I have described it to people who have then gone and not quite seen it. It is there. You have to be there at the right moment. The right moment is available approximately three times a week for four months. Plan accordingly.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/
