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The Bandstand
When Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers sang "
Isn't it
a Lovely Day to be Caught in the Rain
" in the 1935
film
Top Hat
it was meant to be the Hyde Park
bandstand but it was actually filmed on a soundstage
at RKO's Hollywood studios.
Our Victorian forefathers thought “good music
would free the mind of urban griminess and
humanise the industrial landscape”. Good music
meant stirring militaristic and patriotic themes
played by upright sober men in brass bands to draw
the industrial terrace dwellers away from the music
halls and gin palaces. This was the ‘
industrial iron
age’
when everything from railway stations and
market buildings to park benches were fashioned
from brightly painted decorative wrought iron. The
rich decoration and oriental shape of the Victorian
bandstand was inspired by the expansion of the
empire into India with the first domed bandstand
erected in 1861 in the Royal Horticultural Society’s
gardens in South Kensington.
Abercrombie War Babies
Most parks battle the spreading city keeping constant
vigilance against being built on but in London we’ve
have turned the whole process upside down by
demolishing buildings to make parklands.
Two such parks, Southwark’s Burgess Park and Mile
End Park in the East End are the end product of a
lengthy process that began with the dream of the
wartime planner Sir Patrick Abercrombie who was
determined to reward poor Londoners with some
beauty for their Blitz spirit. From 1947 onwards the
old LCC, as it was then, began buying up bomb sites,
slums, old factories including one that made a million
bibles in its lifetime and other industrial plots in a mile
long strip following the course of the old, unfinished
Surrey Canal. The canal was meant to link the Thames
at the Surrey Docks with Epsom in Surrey but never
made it out of Camberwell. Burgess Park is a bitter
sweet park: the lake started at 8 acres but eventually
reached 13 acres with the demolition of two schools
no longer needed once all the houses had been
demolished.
Mile End Park is also an Abercrombie baby, born in
the 1940s London Plan. 60,000 men of Essex had
camped here in 1381 during the Peasants Revolt.
Today the 90 acre linear park has been created from a
ribbon of derelict land, industrial neighbourhoods and,
well yes, let’s call it slum housing. Wedged between
two old canals, the Regents Canal and the Hertford
Union which runs along the side of the much-loved
East End Victoria Park, work on Mile End Park didn’t
begin until the late 1990s when The Green Bridge over
the Mile End Road, designed by Piers Gough, opened.
Gardenvisit.com calculates it to be our most expensive
park ever with total capital and running costs equating
to a massive £51.14 per visit which, according to
Gardenvisit.com:
‘may be only half the cost of a visit
to the Royal Opera, but it still seems rather a lot to
exercise a dog’.
That, of course, was pre-London 2012. Stratford’s
Olympic Park was also fashioned from industrial
wastelands surrounding the old canals and rivers
known collectively as the Bow Back Waters. One of
the last East End smoked salmon works and the old
Yardleys Lavender factory were swept away in the site
clearance for the Olympic Stadium. But what is so
very unique about the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
is that when it opens it will be the first British park to
have been built of memories. The memories of each of
us who saw the torch pass; who were lucky enough to
have been there during the Olympic or Paralympics;
for each of us who roared our support for Jessica and
Ellie and Mo and young Jonnie Peacock. Memories of
The Happy & Glorious Games. We look forward to
taking your folk for a walk in the park.