Environmental concerns are no excuse for not looking after public spaces

An unholy alliance between cost pressures and the climate cult is making England's public realm untidy and unattractive

As you leave Cullingworth and head towards Harden you travel along what locals call the “Mad Mile”, a reference to it being a fast stretch of road between the two villages. And because everyone has floored it to get up the hill they aren’t (quite correctly) looking at the state of the pavement. But that pavement is a mess of cracks, weeds and crumbling kerbs.

If this mess was a one off I’d be straight onto the council to ask for some action but everywhere around the village you’ll see the same problem especially with weeds. These are not just a few brave plants fighting up through a crack or two but whole forested ecosystems populating the gutter and the edge alongside the walls. Lovely new soil is created by the erosion of the road, the rotting of leaves and the washing of debris into the highway. And grass, dandelions, thistles and foxgloves are loving it. As Jethro Tull sang, nature is creeping back into our built up areas as a result of our neglect of those places:

“Jack do you never sleep - does the green still run deep in your heart?

Or will these changing times, motorways, powerlines, keep us apart?

Well, I don't think so.

I saw some grass growing through the pavements today.”

This neglect isn’t completely accidental, nor can we point exclusively to council’s struggling for funds. No, a great deal rests with the deliberate choice of our government to deprioritise looking after the public realm because the process of keeping places nice doesn’t fit in with the Net Zero obsession and anyway politicians prefer giving people entitlements to looking after roads, parks, playgrounds and high streets. And meeting Net Zero is now a top priority for councils:

“Work is already underway, with more than 300 councils in the UK that have declared a Climate Emergency and others delivering climate change plans even without having done this. This workbook sets out how Councillors can play an active role in supporting their council and their communities in working towards the Net Zero target.”

This workbook, produced by the Local Government Association talks at length about reducing emissions, sustainability and even the nonsense that is “doughnut economics” but the work is silent about making places look nice. This simply isn’t seen as important for councils any longer and even where weedkilling is seen as important, the environmental lobby has targeted the most effective chemical control systems:

“The Green Party has asked Cumberland Council to "establish a plan to phase out the use of glyphosate, external and other synthetic herbicides and pesticides on all council owned or managed land". More than 80 councils across the UK have already phased-out or put measures in place to end use of the pesticide, Green Party councillors Jill Perry and Helen Davison said.”

Even where effective weed killers are still used, councils are changing the frequency and method of treatment. Since we were talking about Cullingworth, here’s what our local council does:

“Currently the Parks and Cleansing Service employs a contractor who provides three sprays per year to the public highway network. This spraying regime uses specialist equipment that only targets actual weed growth rather than blanket spraying of the highway surface. This means only a few droplets are applied to the target plant and minimise the volume of spray used which provides both environmental and cost benefits”

There we have it: “environmental and cost benefits”. And the result is that, unless people clear outside their house themselves, the weeds thrive. To rationalise this, councils and their green-obsessed advisors put out a message that this ‘more natural’ environment is a good thing rather than an untidy mess of weeds. This message is reinforced by strategies like ‘No Mow May’ where verges and central reservations are left to grow into the Summer rather than cut from Spring onwards. Again the rationale is that this is good for biodiversity and provides those environmental and cost benefits.

But unkempt verges, long grass and more of those weeds are unsightly and it is not necessarily the case that putting off mowing really does improve biodiversity or the environment. Here’s plant pathologist, Sara Stricker:

“Stricker had not exactly called for a Blitzkrieg on biodiversity. In fact, she encouraged people to plant a wider range of species if they wanted to help support wildlife…In an experiment described in GreenMaster, a trade publication for Canadian golf course managers, her institute found that No Mow May was unlikely to make much of a difference: Over the course of the one-month study, unmowed plots of Kentucky bluegrass did not substantially support more flowers compared to plots mowed at two-and-a-half inches.”

So the evidence tells us that putting off mowing the grass isn’t the big win that its advocates claim indeed, as Stricker’s research indicates it could make things worse, especially if combined with another eco-friendly (and cost-friendly) practice, not clearing leaves away:

“By avoiding lawn mowing until June, the unintended consequences were increased weed invasion and decreased turf quality. Regardless of Leaf treatment, flower number did not differ between mowed and unmowed treatments except when counting immediately followed mowing. Thick leaf litter over turf in the winter led to turf death followed by weed invasion. The challenges we observed associated with No Mow May and Leave The Leaves initiatives could be addressed by integrating science-backed practices and considering regional variations in climate and grass species.”

We have, in these now widespread practices, as well as in the scaling back of weed control, an unholy alliance between environmental propaganda and council cost-saving, all resulting in at best less tidy public spaces and often an appalling neglected mess. And this seeming neglect adds to other practices that signal a lack of care and the deprioritising of having nice places. These include the modern preference for low maintenance park planting (again justified as an environmental measure), the replacement of paving with asphalt, the closing of public toilets, and the closing of boating lakes and paddling pools. The preference for the natural results in places that were built as ornamental gardens becoming wild and unkept. The picture at the top of this article shows Chellow Dene in Bradford, a pair of reservoirs built to provide water for the city that were (because that’s what late Victorian councils did) made into a great park. The reservoirs are still there and remain open to the public but all the infrastructure of the park has gone, it is just a place to walk the dog and feed the ducks or to enjoy a good walk.

We have allowed this idea that seeing grass growing through the pavements is somehow right to take hold in the mind of council managers who’ve been asked for savings. And the result is that everything about our public realm now seems sloppy, uncared for and, often, neglected. There is no good reason and the environmental claims are overplayed, meaning that the main benefit for public authorities is that they save some money. And, as anyone who has visited Estepona would know, the positive effect of good gardens is enormous. Yet we’ve decided, in a terrible alliance between cost accountants and the climate cult, that unattractive, messy and unkempt public spaces are somehow a good thing. Maybe, take a look, we should change.