NAME YOUR PARK: MY IDEAS AND PLANS
In 2015 I was part of the “Your Name Here” citizen project. The good people of St Helens were granted the opportunity to nominate someone whom they felt was deserving of the honour of having a park in St Helens named after them. There were hundreds of qualifying nominations, and I was cheered to have been one of them. I was hailed as the 'Socrates of St Helens,' no less! (And we all know what the locals did to him! Philosophers can tend to be unpopular. But here I still am). Indeed, I was honoured to have been selected for the final short-list, alongside such local luminaries as world racing bike champion Geoff Duke, the formidable Sister Duffy from Providence Hospital, whom everyone feared/respected/loved, and the artist Graham Smith, the egg and sausage man, who lived down the road from my home, a local eccentric who was known to give away his paintings in return for a kiss. I never had one of his paintings. Then again, I never gave him a kiss, either. Good company, I’d say. There were forgotten figures, too. Looking back now I wish that I had taken the opportunity to nominate Herbert Mundin, a man who was born at the top of the road where I live in the late nineteenth century, and who went on to star in Hollywood films alongside Errol Flynn and Clark Gable. He was Much the Miller’s son in one of my all-time favourite films, The Adventures of Robin Hood. He stole from the rich and gave to the poor, the romantics say. In which case times really have changed. The wretches preying on the local community steal from the poor and leave the rich untouched. As indeed do our governments, it seems. We are ruled by the imperatives of an economic system that is nothing less than an organised and deliberate exploitation and parasitism. As for the government policies of ‘trickle down,’ the only thing that has trickled down is ruling class immorality. If we are intent on chasing the low-life in waging any war on crime, I’d recommend that we start at the very top, because that’s where the corruption starts.
Here are the details of the Your Name Here project, when I very nearly had a park named in my honour.
I would have loved to have had a little park in my name. In fact, I'd loved to have had a big park. I had lots of plans and ideas, big and little. I have a very fertile mind and an even more vivid imagination. I studied the urban environment in the past, and have a keen interest in the idea of creative cities, using culture as a dynamo of urban vitality and civic spirit. I saw the park as an opportunity to get creative with culture and the environment. Naturally, as a philosopher, I had plans for a philosopher’s corner. A bench, maybe, or, even better, a table where, if you got un/lucky, you may well have run into me, or other philosophers and would-be philosophers, and would be able to put the world to rights/idle away a few hours in the open air. We have pubs for this kind of thing, of course. But I always liked the description of Aristotle as the peripatetic philosopher. He would both talk and walk his philosophy, walking as he lectured. I do all my best thinking whilst walking. There’s definitely a connection between philosophy and walking.
Some of the finest thinkers in history were also enthusiastic walkers. In his surprise bestseller, Frédéric Gros uses philosophy to show how walking can bring about a sense of peace.
But that's me, a philosopher. I received a great nomination, but the unveiling would have been interesting had I won - whoever was in charge of the crayons spelt my name wrong ... Like the announcement of my PhD in the paper, where I was identified as having qualified in 'Germainic' philosophy, Marx evidently being deemed far too dubious a topic.
Be that as it may, I pictured people strolling around the park talking philosophy. A little walk in the park, before sitting down at the philosophers’ table. Then going for a walk again if the arguments got too complicated and required a little unknotting. I fancied a little enchanted wood, too, dotted with the odd sculpture here and there. I’ve seen the Alice in Wonderland trail in Llandudno, statues around the town, but also the Alice themes up in Happy Valley at the foot of the Great Orme. It makes for a very pleasant day. And Tin Tin and other such delights in an enchanted forest in Switzerland. We don’t have much of a forest in this park, mind. We could do some reforesting, then, as part of a Reforest Britain Now! project. Rewilding is the way to go. We could have done some of this. I am rather keen on a little nature trail, a little urban wilderness, emphasising rewilding as the coming force for greening the world, or a nature garden, planting things of real botanical interest, putting up little descriptions to encourage people to read and investigate further.
In particular, I thought of something showcasing St Helens’ industrial heritage, as well as something pointing to the future, in the interests of integrating industry into nature. The park is a former industrial site, so this would have been most appropriate, keying into local history and the things that made St Helens what it is (a struggling deindustrialised town, I know, but with superb walking country and good connections to Liverpool and Manchester, and bags of potential).
I needed a much bigger park for all of this, of course. And it would take a lot of skill, expertise, time, and money. I’m pragmatic, and was just throwing ideas around in my head in the first instance. I was thinking of a little Green taskforce of volunteers, a band of merry men and women and little folk reclaiming social and associational space as their own. I was thinking of inspiring a little Green citizenship, creating a little task force to clean the area up and keep it in a decent state, fostering a Green civic sensibility that could spill over into other areas.
I had a few good ideas, then. The best idea of all was to create an urban green team, fostering the agency that invests a place with a sense of purpose, direction, and ownership. People care for something they know intimately in having created it and committed to it. As the saying goes, people protect what they love. It was the connection to place, culture, and history as a lived experience I was seeking.
Addendum 30th April 2019
I now learn that a 'Workers' Memorial' has been erected in Vera Page Park. The statue is made of old tools will make future generations aware of St Helens' industrial heritage, commemorating the toil, effort, and skill of workers in creating and sustaining that heritage and, in reclaiming it, extending it into the future.
The project's instigator, John Riley, said at the unveiling: “This monument is about inclusion, it’s to the forgotten, the unsung, those people who have lost their lives because of their job. Those by their toil have made our lives better.”
I give my full support to the endeavour and share the sentiment behind it.
I shall write more on this in another post. I shall make a few brief comments for now. Remembrance can have strange psychological effects upon those who remember at a distance from the people and events being remembered, reifying and romanticizing what may well have been a shameful and sordid squandering of human potentials, lives wasted by way of early deaths, impaired bodies, and scarred psyches, all testaments to lives lived under the shadow of what is promoted as the work ethic and its virtues. If I celebrate labour, then I don't varnish it, not in the form of the involuntary breaking of bodies and minds at the various coal-faces at which men and women have been forced to work, offering a tangible reproach to a society that continues to demand its human sacrifices to its new idol of capital. Work can be bad for your health.
It is a travesty when remembrance can take precedence over truly remembering - and valuing and revaluing the labour of workers past, present, and future, enlisting the voiceless dead in a ritual that ensures that their successors suffer the same fate. Remember the workers dead and fight for – and with - the workers living is the spirit behind The Workers' Memorial, and I fully support it. I believe in remembering rather than remembrance, honouring all those workers who came before us in an attempt to see true value for our own work in the present, building a future worth having for those who come after - solidarity between the generations, passing on the ideals for a world at one, a world in which workers of all lands are in union..