HIDDEN CORNERS
Park life Travis Elborough rambles through the Library’s collections in search of books about public parks
As a cursory thumb through the OED in The London Library’s own Reading Room confirms, the etymological origins of our word ‘park’ derive from the Old French parc, meaning ‘an enclosed tract of land reserved for keeping and hunting deer and other game’ , or ‘beasts of the chase’ , as some earlier editions rather more colourfully phrase it. Writing non-fiction books has always seemed to me akin to quarrying a prey. The subject, once chosen, needs to be pursued doggedly, with books, articles and interviewees, winkled out of its hiding place, and trapped, snared and filleted for information. All of that research – and the subsequent composition – invariably involves a good deal of equally metaphorical wading through long grass, often to modest ends. But a real pleasure of working on A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, my history of public parks and green spaces, was the excuse it gave me to leave my desk and go quite specifically and purposely wading through acres of long grass, as well as ambling over neatly trimmed lawns and up serpentine paths. Another was, of course, the opportunity it provided for me to roam, like a literary big-game hunter armed with a MacBook Air rather than a rifle, on a search for books of a horticultural bent, through the stacks and shelves of the Library, an institution located on land that once formed part of a great royal hunting park. St James’s Park’s own colourful history of verdure, animal slaughter and foppish aristocratic sport can be read about in two books found in Topography, London: The Royal Parks of London (1978) by Guy Williams, and Neville Braybrooke’s London Green: The Story of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park 18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
and St James’s Park (1959). The roots of such hunting parks are deep. Anyone wishing to go right back to the beginning would be advised to head to History. Assyria & Babylon, since the earliest known description of a park-type landscape appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh. This ancient Sumerian poem is believed to have been written around 2000 BCE, and the text was preserved on stone tablets from the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh, near today’s Mosul in Iraq. It tells the story of two friends – Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk, one-third human and two-thirds deity, and Enkidu, a wild man of the woods previously given to consorting with animals – and their quest to discover the secret of immortality. The search leads them to a sacred cedar forest, forbidden to mortals. Well-tended, with winding trails and beautiful flowers, tall trees, sweet-smelling
plants and exotic beasts, it is – to all intents and purposes – a park. It even has its own keeper, an ogre named Humbaba, whose breath is said to be ‘like fire’ , and whose jaws are ‘like death’ . The Library possesses a few translations of the epic, including the original 1960 Penguin Classics edition by N.K. Sandars, and its successor in that series, the more recent and highly readable 1999 version by Andrew George. But public parks as we know them today, with their familiar benches, flowerbeds, sports pitches and band-stands, arguably owe more to the Metropolitan Board of Works and other similar civic bodies across the nation than to ancient Mesopotamia. Like the Library, they are largely mid-nineteenth-century inventions. The degree to which they were inventions is emphasised in the title of another London Library volume, The Invention of the Park:
