Why are Britain's park barbecues going private?

New Statesman​

7 days ago

Photo by Roger Cracknell / Alamy
One of my most-pedalled summer cycle routes is through the Olympic Park in east London. This leads me into what is known as East Village: gentrific-ese for the redeveloped area that served as the Olympic Village in 2012. It has since transformed into an eerie residential district of glassy-eyed housing blocks, lilypad blobs of green and a local economy powered by dynamic croissant pricing.
On these bike rides, dodging toddlers and frightened Italian greyhounds in polo necks, I grew fond of one innocuous strip of grass on the eastern fringe of the park. In 2014, the year I moved to east London, communal brick barbecue pitches were installed there for anyone to use on a first-come-first-served basis, for free. Suddenly, there was some joyous chaos to the place. All hungry life was here. Sprawling, messy gatherings for football clubs, Pride parties, iftars, Ukrainian Independence Day, Sizdah Be-dar, asados, braais, first birthdays and 50th ones. Grandparents snoozing on camping chairs in the shade; kids wielding corn-on-the-cobs as big as their heads; dads with tongs. London united in that primal, pan-cultural impulse to light a fire and grill things over it.
But by 2022, all four barbecues in the area had gone; there are no plans to reinstate them. Get Living, the build-to-rent developer of East Village, had them removed after reports of loud music, littering and illegal parking. In the pandemic era, a quiet backlash against al fresco gathering crept through the country, such was the local distaste for outsiders – often with no gardens and nowhere else to go – visiting national parks and beaches in record numbers at that time. In 2020-22, barbecue stands in Southend, Somerset and across London were all removed. As far as I can tell, from an informal survey of London parks, there are only two grill plinths left.
This scalpel to our civic life is subtle but scarring – a 'minor social symptom', as George Orwell put it in his 1944 Tribune article 'As I Please', when lamenting the railings being put up around London's parks and squares. Years earlier, they had been removed for the collection of scrap-iron, but also as a 'democratic gesture' to a war-weary public in need of green space. Freedom was the point. 'The parks were improved out of recognition by being laid open, acquiring a friendly, almost rural look that they had never had before,' Orwell wrote. 'Many more green spaces were now open to the public, and you could stay in the parks till all hours…'
From pay-to-book football pitches to fob-access playgrounds, Britain's communal amenities are vanishing from council budget spreadsheets. Barbecue stands are a standout example this summer, as it becomes clearer each year that this is a hot country now, and our infrastructure is falling behind.
Where the public realm retreats, private enterprise gallops in. A start-up called EverGrill now charges users for the electric hotplates in north London's Paradise Park £10 for 30 minutes of cooking time via an app. Its Germany-based founder is asking other councils to instal stands. He aspires to Uber's Lime bike scheme – for example, making users take a photo to prove they have left the hotplates in a decent state.
'In case they don't behave, or they don't clean, we can charge,' he told me. When I asked him if paid time slots change the nature of a barbecue – laid-back and open-ended affairs with many dishes to prepare at different speeds, inevitably with lots of semi-competitive hovering – he accepted it did, but 'in a positive way'. 'You get a better service, because you know you can have it to yourself… It optimises the resource.' For councils, the upside is a third party incentivising maintenance and order, while maximising use.
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Yet despite handwringing over vandalism and littering – common excuses made by the bureaucrats ridding their parks of such features – such 'democratic gestures' of free leisure have always been possible. Bournemouth, for example, bucked the national trend in 2021 by installing 29 electric barbecues across its beaches for anyone to use in the summer months. Burgess Park in the south London borough of Southwark redeemed itself last year by installing three free electric hotplates to replace its six beloved grills – described by the food writer Jonathan Nunn as 'home to a thriving barbecue culture… This wasn't sausages and burgers on a Tesco box, but jerk chicken, large rumps of picanha, ribs, suya, eaten and shared in groups of dozens' – which were closed off in 2020.
When 'minor social symptoms' begin riddling your neighbourhood, they shouldn't be ignored. Public parks – and our freedom to access them at leisure – are 'comparatively modern and hard-fought developments', warned Travis Elborough, a writer nicknamed the 'hipster Bill Bryson', in his 2016 book A Walk in the Park. 'The roots of even the humblest neighbourhood park or recreation ground lie in age-old battles over land and liberty.'
The patrician concept of 'rational recreation', an aim to control working-class leisure time by promoting sport and self-improvement, characterised the Victorians' creation of public parks. By that era, the enclosures – a process of fencing off common land for manorial ownership – had largely been completed. Peasants could graze cattle freely on 'the commons' before these began. We may have lost that right, but our freedom to grill beef patties from those poor old cows is still, just about, in play.
[See also: How anti-migrant politics came for Deliveroo]
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