Sefton Park in Summer: Barbecues, booze, bins
The summer always makes me realise how much work goes into making Sefton Park looking tidy and pretty.
At the end of a weekend the park looks like a bomb has hit it, with discarded bags of rubbish lying around bins like scallies surrounding a newsagents.
Everyone seems to make a beeline for Sefton Park in the summer, and there are endless amounts of festivals, various events and bloody fun runs.
The park’s grassy expanses are perfect for lounging in the summer, but the growth in supermarket booze cruises and portable barbecues rather take their toll on public space in the summer, to my mind.
Sefton is probably at its most boring in the summer: the flora and fauna are at their least impressive and the place takes quite a battering.
Sefton Park CC’s lower ground is a constant attraction to teams of footballers, joy riders and ne’er-do-wells intent on causing trouble, to the chagrin of the groundsmen who fight running battles with ‘Toxtethians’.
But, after all, this is what public spaces are for. It makes it clear just how important green spaces are in the big city for the sanity and health of everyone who lives within one. It was one of things I missed most about living in town.
So, Sefton Park in summer isn’t the intriguing, beautiful, vaguely bleak place it is at other times of year. But it performs an admirable role in the city’s culture, health and life across race, religion and, er, running.
Comments
Dead right. Sefton Park is an urban glory. After its renovation, it’s now magnificent. Keep the park; lose the people. They don’t deserve it. For Godsake, the footie players prefer to drive across the park if they can. Where they’ve been blocked, bikes ruin the grass instead. The vandalism visited on the old boathouse, bandstand and wooden rowing boats has been a longstandng disgrace. The new cricket pavillion has become a grafitti-sprayed, metal-shuttered eyesore. And I’ve watched some idiots purposefully walk across the cricket square and commit all manner of dreadful behaviour on the wicket – and not just when Sefton Park 3s or 4s are batting either.
Sefton Park, in spring especially but in autumn too, is a wonderful local treasure. If we’re not vigilant, the nutters will ruin it for good
What a snobby article, not only do you equate “scallies” to pestilence you use the term ‘Toxtethians’ which brings to mind the anti-Liverpool journalism you got in the eighties. Funny you pick on that area, why would that be i wonder?
It’s a park, people can play football, as they can play other sports such as tennis, the council has provided areas for these very activities. Perhaps you would like a toll to price out those you deem unworthy of this “public space” The biggest mess i have seen is due to the council completely under estimating the amount of rubbish that would be produced. They need more bins, simple as that.
Anyway, bring on winter so the great-unread stay in doors while you attempt to look interesting by taking photos of Peter Pan with snow on his bonce.
You obviously didn’t read the article, you blithering berk.
I quote:
‘But, after all, this is what public spaces are for.’
I think you reveal far more about your own prejudices than any you’ve read into my supposed attitudes.
I did read the article and it seemed like a rant against those you feel shouldn’t use the park with a rather weak “Well i suppose that’s what the place is for’ ending tacked on. There is an overall superior tone which overrides the piece, if it was a paean to the park and those behind the scene who maintain it’s beauty, why not say it without resorting to attacking those you deem unworthy of it’s magnificence.
And please don’t attempt to use layman psychology to make out it’s my problem. You were the one that used the term ‘Toxtethians’, not me.
Do me favour, if you want to bring your own shoulder chip to the table be my guest, but don’t make out there’s something in the article there’s not.
What exactly is the problem with the word Toxtethians by the way? Apart from denoting someone from Toxteth, an area I called home for some time, it’s meaningless.
It just seems a bit odd to pick on that area That’s all. I don’t even know how you would know the people causing this trouble all live there, what is it that gives them away?
The Sefton groundsman used the term, which is why I used it, and in inverted commas. He eventually befriended them, presumably he discerned they were from Toxteth.
So it was much the chagrin of one Groundman. Got it.
That’s really all you’ve got left eh?
No the overall snobby tone and the rather weak simile ‘like scallies surrounding a newsagents’ makes it clear what a self-satisfied, status craving, media twonk you really are.
So it was all you had left. After your hopeless attempts to craft any sort of structured argument I shouldn’t be surprised.
WIth reference to your previous comment, the only thing you’ve ‘got’ throughout this whole exchange is the wrong end of the stick.
You first misunderstood the article, and then attempted to misrepresent what I was saying.
When I gave you a perfectly reasonable explanation as to why I used a word you took bizarre exception to, you simply fell back to weak implication, and then a crap insult that doesn’t even make sense.
I’ll be sure to keep my eyes peeled around the park for someone sporting a huge chip on their shoulder.
I’ll look out for the roving reporter grilling the groundsman and still has no concept of tone.
Well, that’s me put firmly in my place.