Yeah, I can?t stand them. So last Saturday, after a night waking up at two, three, five and six, when I finally gave up my ambition to sleep at seven, and couldn?t complain about it being hot because a week before I?d written a rant right here about people who complain about it being hot, I set off for an early, shady walk to the park.
And was pretty annoyed to discover a funfair had taken it over. Carousels, rollercoasters, waltzers, megaphones and caravans, 4x4s, cars, lorries, washing lines, ice-cream vans, generators, and all the other detritus required to house a huge funfair and run the lives of those who operate it.
So my cool walk instead involved picking my way around the obstacles Barnet council had clearly decided were lucrative enough to justify shoving local residents (I hate to add tax-paying here, but it is indeed us who pay for the park grass being churned up by rides) into a small enclave with little shade.
Even the kids? playground was enveloped by the funfair ? so good luck to parents hoping to let their sweltering tots run free, for free, in the park. And this was the fourth funfair to take over our park in as many months.
They don?t have many merits: encouraging kids to gamble to win scratchy teddy bears and scoff sugar, and providing an ambrosial environment for pickpockets.
But you can imagine how approval came about at council HQ. Not an especially evil ambition of stopping Londoners from enjoying their open space but a lucrative revenue-raiser for an austerity-struck council.
It?s happening across the capital: last year London?s eight royal parks pocketed ?18.7?million income ? ?5?million more than the previous year ? after filling them with events such as pop concerts and Hyde Park?s awful Winter Wonderland. Not content with squeezing that much more profit out of parks, this summer anyone wanting to visit Hyde Park for a spot of footie or amateur game of rounders will have to spend up to ?30 an hour to do so. The Royal Parks have handed their old footie pitches, where we?d use jumpers as goal posts for a kickabout, over to private company Will to Win.
So as the people behind a campaign against the charges put it, ?a year on from the Olympics which was meant to get the country playing more sport, a private company has been given the job of actively discouraging people from doing so in the heart of London?.
Councils should certainly be imaginative in working out alternative money-making ideas that don?t demand more from residents. But each has thousands of empty buildings ? schools over the long summer holidays, their own offices in the evenings, vacant properties and scout huts and youth centres that aren?t used all the time.? Each of them would be a preferable option to choking up our parks.
Our little local scraps of green ? sometimes the only place that kids whose schools sold off their playgrounds have to run free ? should be run for people, not for profit.
Twitter @lucytobin
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