Introduction

Neglected and underfunded after a decade of austerity, urban parks in the UK were thrust into the limelight by the COVID-19 pandemic. During the spring lockdown, they were among the few public spaces that remained open and accessible. The management of the pandemic was marked by changes in rules about what could or could not be done outside.

The imposition of rules on the use of public space, and public reactions to them, highlight both the value and the contested character of urban green spaces (see also Chapters Eight and Nine, this volume). Focusing on Sheffield, a post-industrial city in northern England, this chapter considers how space can be understood through personal and community attachments to places, and public and political responses to COVID-19. It explores how the visibility and invisibility of different publics engaged in everyday leisure activities exposes underlying inequalities.

It begins by outlining parks’ historic background as appreciated but depreciating urban assets and briefly charts the course of the lockdown as it affected public space in England. It then examines the experience of lockdown in four urban green spaces, first in terms of attachments to place and then in terms of absences. It discusses whether absences are, or could become, exclusions, curtailing the value of green spaces as genuinely public. Finally it reflects on the future of urban parks in the light of current policy directions.

Lockdown

To understand UK parks’ current position and the importance of their role during the lockdown, we need to rewind the clock 40 years. The dismantling of the post-war welfare state saw a race to the bottom in terms of maintenance and management as municipalities were compelled to put greenspace services out to competitive tender to cut costs and – ostensibly – reduce the burden on local taxpayers (see also Chapter Seven, this volume).

This in turn prompted a rediscovery of the value of parks and a decade of reinvestment at the turn of the millennium. The current of policy shifted again after 2010 when Britain's Coalition government introduced a decade of austerity, with the ax falling particularly heavily on local councils, which own and manage most parks. By 2017 a parliamentary investigation declared England's parks to be at ‘a tipping point of decline’ (House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee, 2017).