neW urBan environmenTs, C.1860–1950^177and fern within Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.^85 But parks, like other
urban environments, were dynamic, their flora changing with different
management regimes, new planting and adventitious arrivals. By the1950s
further surveys in these two parks recorded many significant changes, with a
decline in several of the species dominant in the late nineteenth century, such
as Sun spurge (Euphorbia helioscopia) and lesser celandine (Ranunculus
ficaria).^86
Older parks like this, with a varied range of habitats and numerous trees,
attracted a wide range of birds. In the central London parks in the 1920s and
‘30s, for example, starlings, house sparrow, wood pigeon, mallard, blackbird,
great and blue tit, robin, carrion crow, jackdaw, greenfinch, chaffinch,
spotted fly-catcher, tawny owl, mute swan, moorhen, coot, mistle- and song-
thrush, hedge-sparrow, cuckoo, wren and tufted duck, and even great spotted
woodpecker, were all recorded as nesting species while non-breeding visitors,
especially in winter, included the ubiquitous gulls, brambling, grey wagtail,
treecreeper, fieldfare, kingfisher, lesser spotted woodpecker, sparrowhawk,
heron, and great crested grebe. In November 1925, no less than 3,981
individual birds from 25 species – 14.5 to the acre – were recorded in
Kensington Gardens.^87 Many were doubtless attracted there by the fact
that, as Hudson noted in the case of Hyde Park in 1898, they were regularly
fed by visitors and encouraged by the park authorities as ‘ornaments’.^88 In
city centres, where there were few large gardens, parks often provided the
only habitat for hedgehogs, and in the course of the twentieth century, they
became home to increasing numbers of grey squirrels, some as we have seen
deliberately released there. Numerous butterflies also frequented such places,
attracted by the nectar of plants like aubretia and buddleia.
Parks became more numerous towards the end of the nineteenth century,
partly as a consequence of local government reforms and increasing civic
pride, partly as a result of the Public Health Act of 1875. But at the same
time their design changed, in ways generally less beneficial to wildlife: ‘the
emphasis on active recreation in parks increased steadily throughout the last
decades of the nineteenth, and into the twentieth century, edging horticulture
and promenading into supporting roles’.^89 Existing parks were simplified
to provide more space for organized sports – tennis, football, bowls and
cricket – and new parks were generally designed with the needs of sport
rather than genteel recreation in mind. While they often still included some
areas of ornamental garden, their layout was dominated by extensive areas
of open grass, occupied by football and cricket pitches, where ‘trampling,
rolling and mowing... destroys all the taller plants, leaving to a large extent
pure grassland’.^90 Trees provided limited cover, but these extensive islands
of green were frequented by birds which preferred open spaces, such as
starlings and gulls, and on occasion lapwings, all attracted by the abundant
harvest of earthworms.
There were other kinds of green spaces within urban and suburban areas.
Cemeteries increased steadily in numbers through the nineteenth century,