Campaigners fight to save one of Glasgow’s great parks. But is it too late?

It’s a familiar story in this once-grand Victorian park. I’ve just been walking round talking to the people who use it, people who remember how it was, and the people who are fighting to make improvements (and get the council to make them as well) and it’s a pretty dispiriting experience I must say. Everyone knows that Glasgow is famous for its parks and most of them are still in a decent state. So how come Springburn is in such a poor way? Why is it being neglected? Let me take you round and introduce you to the people I’ve met and maybe we’ll get some answers.

We’re starting where the cricket pitch used to be. Local lad Kenny Ure, who’s in the park with his dog Biscuit, remembers playing here when he was a boy (he’s 48 now). The pitch is long gone though and it’s just one of a list of facilities that have been lost: the putting green, football pitch, bandstand, bowling greens, formal gardens, greenhouse, public toilets. Kenny, who grew up in Springburn and spent a lot of his childhood in the park, says it’s declined massively over the decades. “If this was Kelvingrove Park, it would be different,” he says. All he wants is for his community to get a fair crack of the whip.

Also in the park is Kenny’s sister Alison, who particularly remembers the tennis courts and the putting green and the boats on the pond, where she used to go fishing. Like her brother, Alison thinks the park is neglected because it’s in an area of relative deprivation. Her partner Graham Robertson, who comes here three times a day to walk their dog, feels the same way.

“I’ve been coming to the park for 14 years,” he says, “and I’ve noticed the changes in the last three years, let alone the last 14. It’s not looked after, the grass is just left, bins have been taken away and the benches have been left to rot.”

Graham, who’s originally from Thurso, tells me he loves living in Springburn but it needs its park even more than other areas. “Better off communities have everything on their doorstep,” he says. You can’t argue with that.

I say cheerio to them and continue my walk round and talk to a group of young lads playing on the basketball court, which is one of the few facilities here. They’re actually playing football rather than basketball because the soccer pitches in the park are neglected and unusable and the only other pitches nearby are too expensive. It’s the same point I hear again and again: kids in Springburn need cheap or free facilities more than most areas in Glasgow and yet there’s virtually nothing.

I carry on round the path to an area known as the Rockery where I meet local man John Devlin. John is 55 and as a boy lived on nearby Galloway Street, which it’s fair to say was a pretty tough place to grow up. The park was important to him. He used to come here all the time and remembers the Rockery as it used to be. Beautiful pond, lily pads, a wee bridge. It was so lovely people would come here to get their wedding pictures taken.

But look at it now. The bridge is rotten. The plants have been overcome by weeds. As for the pond – dear God. The water is fetid and black and covered in litter and plastic. The only relatively new addition seems to be a CCTV camera on a tall pole but even it appears to be broken. It’s obvious no-one has looked after this place for years. It’s depressing.

John says he only realised just how bad things had got when he started coming up to the park more regularly during lockdown. “This used to be closely mowed and edged,” he says, pointing at what used to be grass verges. I ask him if it would be like this if the park was in the west end and he says not a hope in hell. “Springburn seems to have been affected by the cuts more than every other park and if you leave a place to dereliction, people say, what’s the point of looking after it? This may be a rough area but you shouldn’t treat people like s***.”

John says we should go for a walk further round the park so he can show me what he means. Up ahead is a fountain, or what’s left of it. The base is long gone and the pillar, made from glazed terracotta and topped by a unicorn, is listing badly. The beginnings of a tree is also growing out of the top. It’s neglect. John tells me the fountain used to be surrounded by formal gardens. “It used to be beautiful here,” he says, “But where are the flowers?”

It’s the same story a bit further round, where there was a formal rose garden for many years maintained by the council. In recent months, volunteers from the Friends group have dug the ground over themselves and planted new roses, although they tell me that they had to overcome the most awful council bureaucracy just to get permission to look after it. Why are there so many barriers in the way of the people who care about this park?

I speak to the chair and the treasurer of the Friends group, who’ve just spent the morning weeding the garden (because no-one from the council is going to do it). The chair, Danielle McPhilemy, remembers coming here as a girl and catching tadpoles in the pond. Now that she’s helping to run the group, she has plans for a new BMX track and a new flower bed by the gates but it all depends on the council transferring the assets. And money of course. It disturbs her that there was a £1.5m council boost for parks and open spaces last year – it turns out Springburn got £48,600 of it.

The treasurer of the Friends group, Louise Mccusker, says one of the reasons Springburn Park gets less of the funding is that for some reason, it is defined as a “local” rather than a “city” park. Like a lot of the other people I meet, Louise is an impressive and determined champion for this place but rules like that frustrate her. “I will keep fighting for this park as long as I can,” she says. “We’ve met with a lot of negativity and barriers but I’m not willing to walk away.”

Just down from the rose garden, I meet the local MSP Paul Sweeney, who confirms what Louise told me about the “local park” designation. He says it means Springburn doesn’t get the same money and maintenance as Kelvingrove or Queen’s Park.

“They are treated as city parks and this is treated as a local park,” he says. “But this was the last big Victorian park to be developed in Glasgow and is the biggest ‘local park’ in the city by quite some distance. It’s a Cinderella.”

He points past the roses up towards the old Springburn winter gardens, an impressive old glasshouse (in ruins since the 1980s). Sweeney is chair of the trust that’s been trying to raise money to restore the building and they have ambitious plans: £2m for an open-air cinema and concert venue and £10m for a full restoration. But so far it’s been bad news: their application for Lottery money was turned down and the council has now eliminated them from the shortlist for UK Levelling Up funding.

Sweeney, who grew up in the area, finds all of this deeply frustrating – he says the council hasn’t told him why they were turned down for the Levelling Up money and the feeling he gets is that everything is essentially left up to the local people to do, even though the community is at a low ebb economically.

“The expectation is we have to do all the hard pedalling and we continually get frustrated by people giving us the thumbs-down,” he says. “All the initiative and the effort is coming from a community that doesn’t have huge capacity and then you get a slap in the face. There’s only so many times you can take it.”

Sweeney tells me we should walk round to the boating pond. This stretch of water used to be the pride and joy of the park: there was a boat house and pedalloes and nearby there used to be bowling greens and a clubhouse (they were shut down at the start of the pandemic “due to Covid” never to reopen). And just up from the greens is the café that used to be the depot for staff. “These assets could be a great boon to the city but they’re just being left to fall apart,” says Sweeney.

There’s another example of what he means just up the road near the high flats. It’s called Mosesfield House, a beautiful Victorian building that was once the home of a bookseller called James Duncan. Now it’s home to the “old men’s club”, a community group for locals where they can come and play snooker, dominoes or just have a chat with their chums.

When I speak to the members inside, I hear a now familiar story. They used to have many more members but the numbers have dwindled since the bowling greens were shut down. The building itself is also in a poor state (broken windows, water running down the walls) and all maintenance by the council seems to have stopped. The guys are worried it won’t be long before it’s shut down altogether like everything else in this park or given to them as a “community asset” for which they have to find the money. They love this place but they’re worried about it too.

I leave the guys to their game of snooker and just outside the building meet 78-year-old Gina Healey, who’s Springburn born-and-bred and has been coming up to the park her whole life. Like the members of the club, she also remembers what it was like in the 1970s: the boating pond, the pedalos, the bandstand, but she’s seen it go downhill. “It’s a great park and a lot better than some of them that get the money,” she says. “I think we’re not getting the money because we’re in Springburn.”

Having spoken to so many people here, it’s hard to avoid coming to the same conclusion. However when I contact the council about it, they tell me that major city parks such as Kelvingrove and Glasgow Green receive additional resources for litter removal because they get more visitors and there’s higher footfall.

The council spokesman also told me that they were sorry to learn of the views being expressed in relation to Springburn Park. “Overall Glasgow residents continue to indicate high levels of satisfaction with the city’s parks,” he said. “We will continue to work with the local community to develop and improve the park wherever we can.”

On the subject of maintenance, the spokesman also told me that Springburn Park was one of more than 90 parks in Glasgow and like most parks in the city was maintained by squads from overall area teams. “We use all our available resources to ensure that maintenance such as ground work, play area checks and litter removal is undertaken on a routine basis across all of our parks,” he said. “We also liaise regularly with Friends of park groups to develop the features and amenities of their park wherever possible.”

The spokesman went on: “Investment in parks and open spaces in every council ward is being made available through the respective area partnerships and Springburn Park will benefit from this investment.

“The criteria for these funding awards ensures a relatively greater proportion of the available budget goes towards areas where deprivation is more prevalent.

“How the funding is spent is determined by local elected members and other community representatives through the area partnerships as part of the community planning process but options for investment can include children’s play, tree planting, heritage, biodiversity and active travel.”

It’s certainly true that there are positives in Springburn Park. An old shed has been converted into a 40-seat auditorium, with funding from the council, and it’s a beautiful little venue (the tiered seating has been made from old pianos). I chat to a couple of the volunteers and it’s obvious that they’re passionate about the place. The Friends group have also got plans for a polytunnel to grow fruit and veg.

However, it seems to me that pretty much all the good work in this park is down to volunteers who have a lot of other stuff on their minds and pressures on their time. As Paul Sweeney points out, many people’s energies in Springburn are consumed by food, warmth, shelter, childcare – they’ve not got time to go down to a board meeting on a rainy February night. And their pals aren’t quantity surveyors and lawyers like they might be near parks such as Kelvingrove.

The people of Springburn need their park even more than those in other areas of the city yet they appear to have less money spent on them. As I walk around, I can’t help thinking about everything this park has lost over the years, bit by bit: the putting green, football pitch, bandstand, bowling greens, formal gardens, greenhouse.

Will it keep going? Will the fountain go as well? Will the old men’s club be pulled down, and the glasshouse? Springburn Park doesn’t deserve this kind of treatment and even though this may well be the most neglected park in Glasgow, there is still, surely, time to make it stop.