Sad Decline of Leicester's Victoria Park

The state of Victoria Park is now quite laughable. The poorly-maintained football pitches have covered the park with bare patches, to such an extent that even on a warm summer day the number of people using it is much smaller than it was before football activity recommenced a few years ago. When the park was used purely as a park it was highly popular; that is hardly the case today.

            The problems began a couple of years ago. The grass was cut very short in the Autumn, presumably on the expectation of yet another mild winter. Instead the winter was bitterly cold, with snow and heavy rain for months. The football pitches deteriorated into a sea of mud, and have never recovered. When Spring came, the park authorities reseeded, but apparently without watering, seemingly relying on the rain to germinate the grass. A severe drought immediately followed, and none of the grass seed germinated at all. It gradually blew away in the wind, over a period of weeks.

            This did not prevent the pitches being used for football again when the season recommenced, even though they were scarcely fit for play. After a long hard year of muddiness, exactly the same sequence of events took place again with reseeding. During the summer, I noticed that couch grass had begun to claim the edges of the bare bits for itself, something the planted grass was obviously unable to do, resulting in a dark green ring of long, tough grass surrounding each patch of bare brown earth. If the city cannot afford to pay for water for the seed, why cannot they collect rainwater from the many roofs the Council controls? It could also be used to refill the pond, which dries out in the summer.

            Some of the park had, until recently, been preserved from devastation. The area to the Welford Road side had not been marked out as a pitch, and was made into some sort of underused cricket area, which left at least some grass for picnicers and the like. Unfortunately, that too has now been turned into a pitch. It seems the City Council doesn't care about any park users other than the footballers.