Harrow Park Visitors Lost in Wilderness

Half of Harrow’s parks are so overgrown and neglected that Harrow Council has declared them a wilderness.

Answering a Freedom of Information request from HaHa Harrow, Harrow Council has revealed that of the 49 open spaces designated as parks in the borough, 22 need serious attention under its “no more wilderness parks” campaign.

These are the parks the new Council leader, Miss Susan Hall, told the Harrow Times were “so overgrown they might be a delight to adventurer Bear Grylls but no one else”.

Although the campaign to combat the undergrowth repeatedly gets central billing in Harrow Council publicity material, we haven’t yet found any of the 22 parks Miss Hall declared were “no secret” and the source of many complaints from her constituents.

Since they are “no secret” and represent nearly 50% of all parks, they should not be hard to find. Every other park in Harrow must be one of the impenetrable ones.

Dealing with the “wilderness parks” is a big issue for the new administration, becoming its first major project at the insistence of Miss Hall and diverting money away from a fund designed to help vulnerable residents cope with the transition to the latest restrictions on benefits payments. Miss Hall’s Conservative administration has decided that rehabilitating “wilderness parks” is a greater social priority.

Our FoI request, made over a month ago, asked the Council which of the parks had been designated wilderness. We are still waiting to find out.

Lowlands Recreation Ground Regeneration Project

Welcome to December, and the much trumpeted revamp of Harrow’s new town park, Lowlands Recreation Ground, has little to show for the nearly £1.5 million invested in it.

The signage on the hideous hoarding surrounding the once open space gushes implausibly of “breathtaking landscaping” which “should completed by December 2013”. When it was announced, the project was due to be opened to the public by August 2013.

In fact, work now appears finally to be starting on the site with the activation of two bulldozers.

In the meantime, the eyesore hoarding has been up for months, blighting the area and cutting off shortcuts to the station entrance. Ironic, since the Harrow council website promises: “New pathways across the park and an extension into Station Approach will improve access for everyone that uses Harrow-on-the-Hill station”.

Lowlands Recreation Ground is never going to “bring the town centre alive” as the council claims, because it is not in the town centre, can’t be seen from the town centre, and offers nothing to those using the town centre. In any case, for lovers of greenery, there is a much better and more used open space across the road.

Harrow town centre is St Anne’s Road and Station Road. Nobody shopping in those streets is going to walk all the way to Harrow on the Hill station, climb the stairs, walk through the station, and descend the stairs on the other side, in order to take a break from shopping to relax in the new Lowlands Park. And then climb back up the stairs etc. to go back to the shops. The very idea is beyond ridiculous.

This huge white elephant is another indulgence of public money which should be being sensibly invested in improved services.

Lowlands should be re-assigned as a cultural and educational site for an extension to the college (permission for which was granted in 2006) and for the erection of a destination building such as a decent main public library, which is desperately lacking in Harrow..