Mansfield Green once more

Amazing, a fence is being put around Mansfield Green! It is not a high fence, just reaching up to the waist of an ordinary person, but it is still a fence and Mansfield Green looks differently already now, while the fence is still under construction.

The amazing thing is not so much that work on the fence began during winter, even though it seems to make sense to wait until the cold days are over and work stoppages are no longer to be expected. The most amazing thing is that a decision about Mansfield Green was made at all and that the decision is being implemented right now. I went to the Libary last week in order to find out who made the decision, on what grounds and when. In the Library you can find plenty of reports about Birmingham City Council and its projects in Aston Ward and Ladywood Constituency, but Mansfield Green was nowhere to be found. A search on the website of Birmingham City Council was not successful either. Clear is that Mansfield Green is not classified as a park. It is either listed under the name of Albert Road Public Open Space or shown on a map as Amenity Green Space.

The public space that Mansfield Green represents was under threat at least twice. Aston Pride, the government regeneration agency for Aston, claimed that 52% of the residents favoured the construction of a community centre on the Green. The statistic was hotly contested by the Mansfield Residents Forum and nothing came of the proposal. The second, more recent, threat came from outside Aston. A group in Perry Barr claiming to represent the Bangladeshi community applied for permission to erect a monument on Mansfield Green in honour of the Bangladeshi martyrs at the time of their struggle for independence against Pakistan. The danger of such a monument was obvious: any attempt to soil the monument by graffiti or otherwise would pit the two ethnic groups against each other. This was the reason that even Bangladeshi people were against the monument, though they could not say so in public for fear of appearing unpatriotic to their country of origin. But other residents, like myself, protested to the City Council in writing, pointing out the divisive nature of the proposal. In the end - I like to think as a response to the protests - the application was withdrawn.

Now Mansfield Green gets its fence. Hopefully, this is the first step into developing the Green into a park worthy of the name. Then the dream of the Mansfield Residents Forum will come true, even after the forum itself ceased to exist. Frustrated by the lack of response from the side of the authorities and the lack of participation of the residents, it closed shop last July. Perhaps prematurely so, as they may have been more influential than they thought!

Ton