Burley Park, Woodhouse Moor, and Sharing Moments With Strangers

A man finds the perfect branch to tie his ariel hoops to and practices callisthenics for a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon. The benches are full of readers, and the tennis courts with people playing doubles. Two girls sit with books in a hammock strung between two trees, and a woman and her son use the bandstand to kick a ball around.

Burley Park is a Leeds City Council community park. It makes up some of Leeds’s 4,000 hectares of greenspace that make the city one of the greenest places to live in Europe. It serves as a communal garden in an area that is predominantly made of terraced houses with small or no outdoor space or yards. With the houses getting little sun because of the layout of the streets, on a sunny day Burley Park, or its neighbouring Woodhouse Moor and Burley Village Green, become filled with members of the community; families playing cricket, or students pitched up with a blanket and books, laptops, or picnics – we can see how assorted our community truly is.

Councillor James Lewis, in his foreword for the Parks and Green Spaces Strategy 2022 to 2032, quotes 19th Century writer John Ruskin: ‘The measure of any great civilization is its cities, and a measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and squares.’ This is true of my experiences of Burley Park and Woodhouse Moor. The greatness of a city and its people can be seen in the people sitting with their books in the evening sun, and the spirit of a place is in the children playing cricket. Lewis goes on to say that ‘Public parks and green spaces have many benefits, particularly for health and wellbeing as I’m sure we all recognise following our recent experience of the Covid-19 pandemic.’ - 90% of Leeds residents have visited a park at least once in the last year.

He goes on to list the benefits of ‘public health and happiness, climate, nature and the wider environment.’ – but there are also deeply human benefits from just spending 20 minutes there.

In the winter, the park is full of people re-becoming their childhood selves and playing in the snow, building snowmen and having snowball fights with strangers. In the sun, residents want to soak up as much as possible before the season changes, and this is a shared experience. Not only is this the ‘community cohesion’ that a 2017 parliamentary report speaks of, but it also creates a poetic sense of belonging and seasonal enjoyment that is inherent in humans – a uniting factor that becomes obvious when sharing a space with strangers. How can we have divisive opinions of people who want to sit in the evening sun just like us?

Burley Park is used as a shared garden, and in this role, it becomes whatever each user wants it to be. Working at a school, reception children’s whole weekends are summed up by ‘we went to the park!’ coupled with a beaming smile for them it has been their whole weekend, a core memory and the best day ever. I alone have used it as a running track, taken my laptop and worked at a picnic bench, eaten dinner there in the last of the evening sun as a sort of balcony, and roller-skated on the smooth concrete to the smiles of strangers.

Local Parks and green spaces are not only vital for health and wellbeing, but also for a sense of belonging and pride in a community, and pride in humanity. Sharing a positive moment, space, or feeling with a stranger is a uniting, human feeling. Seeing people feeling safe enough to practice their private hobbies, activities, and pastimes in a communal space has a shared warmness to it. Strangers perform intimate life and daily rituals in front of us with a shared but unspoken trust.