The tragedy of Grahame Park

I was rather upset when I read Vicki Morris blog today about the scandalous butchering of trees on the Grahame Park Estate. It struck me that Vicki's report was probably the first nice thing I've ever read about Grahame Park anywhere. I suspect that most of the ruling Tories would rather like to outsource Grahame Park Estate to Brent Council. As Vicki notes, when they talk about keeping Barnet green, they don't mean the little bits of green in Grahame Park or the other estates. Places like Grahame Park where trees are few and far between are the type of place that need tree preservation orders, wheras leafy Totteridge has trees coming out of it's ears.

What about the people who live in Grahame Park? Unlike the impression you get from the local press, I've a few friends who live there and strangely enough they are as normal as the rest of my friends. Unlike the gated lanes of leafy Totterdige, people generally know their neighbours. Sure there are plenty of problems, but there are a lot of people on the estate. It may surprise you to know that one of my fondest memories is of Grahame Park. In 1985 my band, The False Dots played the Grahame Park festival. What made this special was that it was one of only two times my Dad ever came to watch the band play. He probably wouldn't have come to that gig, but my cousin, who is a Roman Catholic missionary Priest, then working in Kenya, was over on holiday and he wanted to go. It was an open air gig on a balmy day. The band on before us had been given a hard time by some naughty scallywags who'd realised that the band were, shall we say, not very comfortable in the environment.

As my Dad, Mum & cousin settled down and got a beer and a burger, I started a bit of banter with the kids. I invited them up to tell a few jokes as a warm up and soon they were in to the spirit of the festival. We played a pretty good set (got a write up and a picture in the Edgware Times) and everyone went home happy.

Later that day, I went around to my parents for a beer and a chat with them and my cousin. He said that he thought the festival was fantastic. He said that he'd only ever heard bad things about Grahame Park, but he thought that the sense of community was brilliant. He said that where he was in Africa, things like that happened all the time, but he'd never really seen it before in London. My Dad said to me that he hadn't realised that I actually took music seriously before (strange given that we'd toured the UK, Sweden, Finland & Belgium) and he said he was really impressed with the way we handled the kids. I asked if he liked the music, he said "some of it was OK, I prefer stuff with more of a tune". Years later my cousin told me that he'd used some of the ideas he'd seen at the festival in community festivals he'd helped organise in Africa. He said that the biggest lesson he'd learned was that if you engage with the scalliwags and make them part of the show, then you can transform the situation. Too often they are just treated as a problem to be dealt with.

And there my friend is the tragedy of Grahame Park. The great and the good of Barnet think they know all the answers. Sure they come down and hold "consultations", but they don't listen. They make their decisions, safe in the knoweldge that they will never have to live with the consequences. If it was me, I'd let the residents of Grahame Park set up a committee and give them the cash to spend as they saw fit. I doubt that chopping down trees would be very high on their list of priorities. Idoubt that they'd waste it in the way that Freer & his buddies seem to.