'It's all too beautiful'
A refuge for lovers, loners, children and outcasts - parks provide the settings for some of our most innocent and illicit encounters. No wonder they are such an inspiration for novelists. William Boyd takes a literary tour of urban oases

William Boyd in The Guardian, Saturday 20 June 2009

Angus Wilson (1913-1991), novelist and short story writer, identified what he called an essential dichotomy in the English realistic novel dating back to Samuel Richardson in the 18th century, namely the concepts of "town" and "country" and the opposing values that they imply. The division is an intriguing one, even today, and it is still relatively easy to classify a novelist in one or the other camp. Are you essentially "urban" or are you "rural"? This is not an innocent question, as Wilson infers. To categorise yourself as one or the other is tendentious and provokes a series of unconscious judgments.

In his long autobiographical essay, The Wild Garden, Wilson lists some of the antitheses that "town" and "country" respectively embody: progress versus tradition; art versus nature; industry versus the contemplative life; reason versus instinct; strained sensibility versus sturdy common sense, bohemianism versus rootedness, and so on.

What is the self-appointed urban writer to do in the face of this labelling? Indeed, must one be either town or country? Is it possible to be both at once? On reflection, I would describe myself as an urban writer, if only because I know that after a few weeks of rural life (however delightful) I find myself craving the city and everything it offers. But at the same time the urban writer does not want to be pigeonholed - some of the verities of the country and country life are most appealing and there is a tendency to want to have one's cake and eat it. There is a little bit of the rural in all of us metropolitan types, and to exemplify that well-roundedness in our characters, to bring something of the country to the city - in order not to have to go to the country - the city invented the park.

Battersea Park (pic left from Friends of Battersea Park) is the park that is closest to where I live in London and the one that I know best - I walk briskly through it almost every day. I love Battersea because, alone of all significant London parks (with the exception of Kew Gardens), it incorporates London's river, its north side being defined by the Thames. You can walk along the wide promenade between Albert Bridge and Chelsea Bridge on the Battersea shore, with the broad river on one side and lofty plane trees on the other. The riverine light seems fresher and brighter, as if the air is washed and cleansed by the Thames's tidal flow.

The sense of not being in the city - yet knowing full well you are in its heart - is particularly intense. This, fundamentally, is what a park in a city is all about.

Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, in the pantheon of English literature, perhaps best illustrate the split between the "town" writer as opposed to the "country" one. It is a very 19th-century juxtaposition, made particularly acute and particularly obvious as the industrial revolution took its remorseless grip on the nation. The widespread development of the city park, in turn, was largely a 19th-century phenomenon. The filth and foetor of the Victorian metropolis made the green spaces all the more important. I have a history of London composed solely by its maps, and one can see the exponential growth of the city over the centuries reflected by the steady appearance of its parks, like green islands in the burgeoning, cross-hatched grid of London's streets - not so much the city's "lungs" as the city's verdant archipelago in its dark and grimy sea.

Read the rest of William Boyd's excellent piece at The Guardian online.