Reflective Learning Journal #6

Hyde Park, an ‘idealised landscape’ that ‘feels like home’. For a group report, I am considering how the management and design of the park creates this idea after taking an eight-hour bus journey to London, which had been delayed by four hours because of flooding. Personally, I did not think of Hyde Park as an ‘ideal landscape’ because it is an ‘artificial’ nature, created and managed by Human rather than being managed naturally by animals and weather. I suppose it could be argued that neither the city nor the countryside is entirely natural but in rural areas, nature is given places, many of which are National Parks, to grow without interference from Human exploitation or occupation. Urban areas tend to reintroduce parks and ‘natural’ areas where there may have been infrastructure, managing them in a way which creates a park which feels uniform and artificial, similar to a garden. My opinion may be biased because I live in a quiet rural area and so my attitude towards urban nature is more negative than my opinion of rural nature. Despite this, the vastness of Hyde Park made this densely populated, bustling city feel almost tranquil and empty which made me feel more comfortable than I did in any other part of London.

It struck me how the relationship between people and nature was different to the rural areas I have visited. Most people in the park walked along the paved area rather than the grass and I’ve recently noticed a similar relationship in Exeter. It almost seems like the urban society and the natural world are too completely different worlds that cannot touch, or that nature is the ‘wild’ opposite to the ‘structured’ urban area. This is very different to my rural hometown, where nature and society seem to intertwine and it feels normal to walk across the grass. In Exeter and London, however, I actually feel out of place if I don’t walk along the path laid out for me. I feel like I am being judged for doing something that is normal back home and it strikes me how feelings towards different things, such as nature, can change geographically and spatially. I read an article recently by J. Burgess (1988) which discussed how open spaces are a fundamental part of human life and that humans have a need for it. Through this, I thought of how there is a kind of ancestral link between our heritage and us. The way our ancestors lived and survived from nature has been deeply rooted in all of us, even though we do not use the information to the same extent. In my opinion, this is a fundamental reason why all of us feel some connection to and a need for nature in our own way, be it a plant in our house or a park in our city. Within nature, we can lose ourselves to our thoughts, disappear inside our psyche and escape from the outside world. Everyone needs an escape from reality every once in a while and parks and green spaces like Hyde Park provide us with the opportunity for this. Perhaps the key reason why Hyde Park is ‘idealised’ is because it allows us to escape.

References

Burgess, J., Harrison, C.M and Lamb, M. (1988) People, parks and the urban green: a study of popular meanings and values for open spaces in the city, Urban Studies, 25(6): 455-473.

~ Jones' Journal