‘A Park for All Seasons’: Why Zachariah’s gift to the city is still so precious

This Place, a column by Vicky Foster

Exploring Hull & East Yorkshire

March 2020: first lockdown just announced, spring edging its way into life in all the green areas of the city, and the work on Pearson Park has fallen silent.

The diggers and trucks are backed into a corner of road, the men in hard hats have disappeared, and the new conservatory, like so many of the things we’d all planned, is left half done, completion date unknown.

Cities fell silent, or so we thought, but as the weather warmed up and we all opened our windows, we heard new sounds instead. Identifying bird calls became one of the nation’s new past-times, and Pearson Park was a good place to hear them.

The trees and shrubs attract woodpeckers, owls, robins, finches, wrens. People livened up their thirty minutes’ exercise by listening out to see what they could spot. But that was just the start of the new attraction the park began to hold.

It’s always been a popular place; a place people have made good use of ever since it opened.

Back in 1860, Zachariah Pearson, then Mayor of Hull, made a gift of twenty-seven acres of land to the city’s people, with the stipulation that it was planted with trees and shrubs, and became the city’s first park.

The turning of the first sod was accompanied by a parade that attracted 40,000 people, and gifts of money, swans, trees and a fountain were made to get things moving.

MISTY MORNING: A view of Pearson Park

Any summer’s day in any recent year you’d have found the grass scattered with picnic blankets, sunbathers, groups of kids with Bluetooth speakers.

People would fill up the seats outside the café, ice-cream running down their chins; they’d walk the perimeter of the pond, throwing bread and seed to squawking crowds of ducks that gathered round them.

The playground would be packed. The outside gym equipment populated by people working out, the paths and road pounded by joggers, cyclists, kids on scooters, dog walkers. But now, the activity in the park is infused with an extra sense of importance.

The Victorians were big believers in public parks as places for healthy recreation; places that were good for both physical and mental wellbeing. In Hull, as in many other British cities at the time, it’s not hard to see why.

The Health Report of Hull, carried out in 1847 by doctors including Sir Henry Cooper, found that overcrowded areas of housing had led to streets running with raw sewage and “dreadful want of ventilation and light”.

Parks were known as “the lungs of the city,” and no wonder; you can only imagine what a relief it must have been to escape into one for a bit. Well, I say you can only imagine, and that might have been the right phrase pre-Covid, but not anymore.

For the last year, we’ve all been getting a taste of what that must have felt like. Those thirty minutes of freedom we were allowed back at the start of all this became crucial. Escaping for a bit of exercise in the fresh air, where we can enjoy a bit of greenery, suddenly became just as important to us as it must have been back in 1860.

LUSH: Pearson Park in all its greenery

Over the course of the pandemic, restrictions have come and gone, but the importance of the park has stayed the same.

Last summer you could hear music and laughter until late into the night, as people made their own makeshift alternatives to closed clubs and pubs. Socially distanced football matches sprung up on the fields and the park became the alternative for closed stadiums and sports centres.

Exercise classes and outdoor yoga took the place of gyms. Parents and toddlers met on the grass in groups, an outdoor version of what might have happened before in church halls and community centres.

Now, in lockdown 3 - when we’re not allowed into each other’s homes, hospitality is closed again, we’re working or schooling at home, only allowed to leave the house for exercise, and not to meet in groups - one of the only ways to socialise in person is on a walk.

Any day in Pearson Park, you can see people making the most of this. Friends, family and colleagues, clad in woolly hats, clutching travel mugs of coffee, meander, socially distanced, around the paths that criss-cross the grass.

The freezing weather doesn’t put them off, and there’s a glow about them that’s not just caused by the chilly air. When you see them, you can’t help thinking about the Victorians, promenading on Sunday afternoons when they got their first park.

JC Niven, curator of the botanical gardens, said at the time the park was being planned: “The beauty of the trees now about to be planted will be most highly appreciated by those who are spared to enjoy their genial shade some fifty years hence.”

As it turns out, people have been enjoying those trees for much longer than he predicted, and I bet he’d never have guessed all the activities that would have been taking place beneath their branches, 160 years later.

The conservatory has its roof now; the first plants are acclimatising. You can see the steam from the heaters escaping the vents, and sometimes at night it’s lit up like a giant lantern amongst the dark trees. There’s hope there.

‘THERE WHEN WE NEED IT’: Pearson Park

The council has completed the huge project of restoration despite the pandemic, and they’re planning for the future, like most of us are.

Soon, no doubt, the way we use the park will get back to something like it was before all this started. We’ll enjoy the new bridge, the restored gates, the new plants. But I hope we’ll remember what it did for us too; the way it caught us all when we needed it.

And even that’s not all there is to say about Pearson Park; we’re not the only thing it’s good at catching. During wet weeks, the grassy spaces serve yet another purpose, soaking up the rainwater.

The fields turn into temporary ponds, and the rough roots of the grass hold it until it can drain slowly away. That might seem like an inconvenience when your dog ends up soaked after his walk, or the kids come in drenched from splashing about, but it’s something we might be thankful for as climate change continues and the weather gets wetter.

After London, Hull is the city most at risk of flooding of any in the UK, and one of the ways this can be mitigated is by having the kind of space the park provides, that can do exactly what it’s doing now with excess rainfall.

So, we might be even more grateful to Zachariah Pearson as the years go by.