If you wanted to know what life was like in 90s Britain you could do a lot worse than listen to Blur’s Parklife, an album that represented the peak of the band’s Kinks-ian observational songwriting and helped to kick off Britpop as a whole.
The album has its weaknesses - much has been made of its musical conservatism and obvious debt to the past - but it struck a chord with the British public, staying in the charts for 90 weeks thanks to a narrative songwriting approach that journalist John Harris compared to “a bittersweet take on the UK's human patchwork” in his 2004 book Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock.
Nowhere is this more obvious than on the album’s title track, an ode to people watching in London’s Hyde Park that erupts in the all-telling chorus: “All the people / So many people / And they all go hand in hand / hand in hand through their Parklife.”
Not for nothing is an ode to a park the centre of this album: the British love going to parks and London is dotted with some of the most beautiful green spaces to be found in any of Europe’s capitals. British people eat, drink and procreate in the parks and - maybe even more than the local pub - they represent the essence of British urban life.
I was wandering around Barcelona listening to Parklife this week, when I realised that the same can be said for the Catalan capital. Barcelona may have a beach and boundless squares, teeming with human interaction. But there is only one place to get to the heart of Barcelona life: Parc de la Ciutadella, 70 acres of green space, fountains, playgrounds and zoo to be found on the edge of the city centre.
Ciutadella is not just the city’s most popular park, full of life from dawn to dusk and even beyond. It also tells a story of the city - as all the best parks do - marking Barcelona’s evolution through the weeks, months and years.
In itself, the history of Ciutadella is fascinating: in 1714, after the War of the Spanish Succession, Barcelona fell to Philip V of Spain, who flattened a large percentage of the city and built the citadel of Barcelona right where thousands of families had lived. The hated citadel looked out over Barcelona for more than a hundred years until it was turned over to the city in 1869, with the majority of the site being turned into the Parc de la Ciutadella.
That alone would make the park a fascinating place. But Ciutadella is anything but a historical relic. You can feel the modern city move in the park’s bones, as the morning joggers and dog walkers give way to lunchtime picnics, afternoon sunbathers and evening revellers; and Monday’s lunching workers slide into Sunday’s sweaty hedonists, wringing the last drops of sunshine out of a long weekend.
You can watch the seasons pass there, too. In winter Ciutadella is functional, a cold, windswept space to take the dog for some relief; in spring it blooms, playing host to live music and culture; but the park finds its apotheosis in summer, as thousands of locals and tourists seek escape from the relentless heat under scraggy trees and on welcoming benches.
But the passing of time is nothing without people and Ciutadella tells a social history too, its users offering flesh-and-blood proof of how Barcelona has changed over the years, becoming a truly global city where people from all over the world come to live, work, holiday and make new lives.
This story is inescapable. A visit to the park one Sunday in July reveals Argentinian football supporters rubbing shoulders with French tourists; dancing Indian women sharing space with Catalan jugglers; a multiracial group playing an endlessly circling drum coda on the bench; and - everywhere, like some vast, unexplained rash - people practising their circus skills.
It is a social phenomenon. Many places are. But the park is a great democratiser too: unlike, say, the Camp Nou, that other great symbol of Barcelona’s changing life, you can’t buy a better space at the park and if you want to go there you have to share it with everyone, from Swedish tourists on gleaming new €1,000 bikes to the unfortunate people who sleep under the trees, emerging bleary eyed in the morning form makeshift camps to brush their teeth and wash in the park’s water pumps.
All Barcelona is here, in other words, and - if the people may not quite be going hand in hand, Blur style - they’re generally rubbing along well in their Catalan park life.
And such is a story of modern Barcelona.
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