The enduring everyday
A stroll through the Oxford University Parks
As part of the Oxford | UdK Berlin Partnership in Arts and Humanities, I recently spent a few days in Oxford. The small project that Patrick McGuinness and I are working on is called „Forms of Attention: Mapping the Everyday in Oxford and Berlin.“ How can I get a feel for everyday life in Oxford, I wondered after our first conversations. On an unexpectedly cool morning, I woke up early and decided to go for a walk in the University Parks to sort out my thoughts. Established in the mid-19th century as a place of recreation, the park initially evoked predictable associations in me: the English landscape garden, peripatetic thinking, tradition.
At second glance, I noticed the park benches.
Permanent public seating, as noted by Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani in his book “Bedeutsame Belanglosigkeiten” ("Significant Trivialities"), was already established in the ancient city.1 In parks and gardens, Lampugnani writes, benches served to "mark viewpoints and encourage conversation.“
„Cleverly placed, benches can offer unexpected, stimulating, even delightful views and insights into the urban landscape.“
Yet it wasn't the benches themselves that ultimately captivated me, but rather the memorial plaques attached to them. While relatively uncommon in Germany, they are widespread in the UK, as indicated by the online project Open Benches, blogs, and the BBC. Perhaps that is why the many plaques in the park don't receive special mention on the University Parks website—only those commemorating famous figures are listed.
I grew quite obsessed with these plaques and started documenting them photographically, aiming for a complete inventory. Yes, such signs might be dismissed as a privileged peculiarity, but for me, they contained a kernel of fascination that opened a window onto our topic—everyday life.
Open to the public
„The English garden was designed for everyday use and aimed to provide specific conditions and possibilities for the user's life and psychological economy,“
the German philosopher Gernot Böhme writes in his essay about the significance of the English garden and its theory for the development of an ecological aesthetics of nature.2
Along these lines, the University Parks promote themselves as creating "beautiful green spaces for everyone to enjoy." The seating is not restricted to authorized private individuals (such as, e.g., in New York's Gramercy Park) or paying patrons, as is increasingly common in cities across the globe. The park, though governed by unambiguous rules, views itself as a communal area open to everybody.
Back at home, I came across a recently published paper by Anne Karpf, a professor of Life Writing and Culture at London Metropolitan University. It’s titled ‚She Loved This Place’: Memorial Benches as Death Writing, Life Writing and Life Siting. The summary characterizes memorial benches as
„a reminder of the ways in which public spaces are stitched into daily routines, of the quiet value and meaning attached to local public squares, parks and beaches, increasingly encroached upon by privatisation.“
Accordingly, the memorial plaques on the benches don't primarily commemorate Oxford's countless great names, but rather unknown ordinary people. Memorial benches, Karpf writes, are „a celebration of seemingly undistinguished lives.“
Feeding ducks, counting dogs
What fascinated me most about the many plaques, however, was that they not only commemorate largely unknown people in a public space, but also their habitual activities. They tell stories about the ones who are remembered. What did they do in the park?
It turned out that it wasn't so much eccentric quirks but rather completely ordinary things for which the regulars are remembered. The activities mentioned in the inscriptions include:
walking
running
painting
feeding the ducks
counting small dogs
caring
teaching cricket
spending many hours
meeting a future spouse for the first time
waiting for a lost one to come back.
Occasionally, the direction reverses, reflecting the park's effect on people: the trees gave them joy.
It is almost never something extraordinary that the plaques commemorate. The practices remembered are mostly habitual. Day-to-day existence, these plaques reveal, is rooted in repetition.
The comfort of continued practice
Beyond appreciating ordinary people and their recurring practices, a third aspect of everyday life revealed itself to me that morning in University Parks. It stems from the fact that a park is not a graveyard. Both the gravestones in a cemetery and the plaques in this park commemorate those who have passed away. But a cemetery is above all a place for the dead and the mourners. A park, however, is primarily a place of life, of vibrant nature, and of people who spend significant parts of their daily lives there.
Cemeteries are, predominantly, places of individual recollection. Parks, however, shift the focus onto the endurance of what mattered to the people remembered on the plaques: going about their daily paths, waiting for their loved ones, enjoying the trees. Even after the death of particular patrons, the park continues to impart rhythm and joy to the lives of its visitors. The park administration, it seems to me, is attuned to this idea when they answer the question of whether one can set up a personal memorial bench as follows:
„The Curators of the University Parks are committed to preserving the character as well as the landscape of the Parks, and it is not appropriate that the University Parks take on the role of a garden of remembrance.“
Individual habits end with death, yet the circumstances that make these habits possible in the first place persist, at least as long as they don’t. The example of the park made me realize that everyday life requires something like an accommodating infrastructure—one that provides form to the daily hustle and bustle. In our research in Oxford, we focused our attention on several such facilities: the market hall, hardware stores, pubs, third-generation immigrant eateries, and community centers on the outskirts of town.
Everyday life is threatened when the conditions that enable it disappear or become inaccessible to most people: through thoughtless modernization, ruthless gentrification, or because technological change turns public spaces into permanently monitored zones full of screen-fixated monads.
Conversely, the continued existence of provisions that allow for a good everyday life offers a particular sort of solace, one that transcends the individual's hope of being remembered. What I understood that morning in the University Parks was not only that certain conditions enable everyday life, but that there is comfort in the intergenerational continuity of these institutions. Only when not just you but what you held dear disappears does it truly become hard to say goodbye.
Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani: Die Bank, in: Bedeutsame Belanglosigkeiten. Kleine Dinge im Stadtraum, Berlin 2019, p. 77-81.
Die Bedeutung des englischen Gartens und seiner Theorie für die Entwicklung einer ökologischen Naturästhetik, in: Für eine ökologische Naturästhetik. Frankfurt am Main 1989, p. 79-95.