Local resident urges council to resurrect Friends of Queen’s Park Group
As Queen’s Park gets set to celebrate its 150th anniversary, one concerned resident has been engaging with the Glasgow City Council calling for short and long term improvements to the park, including the reinvigoration of its Friends Group, which has not been active for almost 10 years.
Resident Tony Halifax first raised his concerns about Queen’s Park with Glasgow City Council in February this year. He is now set to point out these concerns to Glasgow City Council Assistant Area Manager Douglas Gellan in a walk around the park to be scheduled quite soon. If Land and Environmental Services (LES) approve, we understand that Gellan has also said he will consider how the Council can support a Friends of Queen’s Park group which Halifax is keen to start. Additionally, the two men have been discussing how Glasgow Community Reparation teams could undertake remedial work which would improve the standard of the park for everyone.
Halifax said:-”They are only offers at the moment, they’ve not been set in stone. But if they are, if there was help to get us a Friends of Queen’s Park set up, I’m sure we could actually make that work. If we could get the Reparation teams in place, then that would actually address some of the backlog of work and then after that the Friends of Queen’s Park working with LES might just actually be able to get a better path forward than we’ve had to date.”
While Halifax already knows about eight people who would be interested in restarting the Friends of Queen’s Park he’s keen to engage with the wider community. He said:- “In terms of the community spirit, I think it would be nicer to open up to a wider community and get a greater involvement if we can.” If the council were to allocate some funds to the Friends Group he would set about finding out what the wider community would want from a Friends Group and Queen’s Park itself.
He is hopeful that the local community will voice its opinion about the park though he is concerned that Glasgow has “a very large silent majority.” Response to his recent actions to engage with the Council from those he has spoken with “state very clearly that they’re saddened by the deterioration of the park; that it’s actually been going on over a long time and nothing’s being done about it. They also actually cite how dirty the Shawlands area and the park location are. That’s come up at two meetings now: the first about the Shawlands development plan which actually took place in early February and more recently at an East Strathbungo meeting which Nicola Sturgeon MSP attended, as well as regular notations at the Shawlands and Strathbungo Community Council meetings.”
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