Matthew Bushell is a Creative Writing student at the University of Northampton and has written the following prose about The Racecourse. You'll read below that he is extremely fond of the place and has written a delightful and informative article covering many of the historical aspects of our premier park..............


The Racecourse

After locating the centre of the 118 acre field now known as the Racecourse, I climbed off my bike and stood still for a few moments in the afternoon sun. I then turned full circle and asked, ‘what does this park mean to me?’ My friend and I jogged around the perimeter early that morning, starting from the west side, near the derelict public toilets. We were experiencing a cold front of weather and it had made the ground icy and the grass brittle. The desolation of the park and its innocent murmurings of life, feeling universal, was as if the world was only just waking up. As we were leaving, my friend thanked me for motivating him; ‘It’s beautiful here this early,’ he said.

I gazed up at the blue ceiling and although it was winter and freezing cold, it looked like the onset of spring. I traced a vapour trail to a soundless aircraft, peacefully making its way, unlike the much noisier Stirling bomber that crashed in Gold Street - a stone’s throw from where I stood, in a south-westerly direction - during 1941; the crew ejected in the air and all but the pilot escaped unhurt – his body was later found on the park.
I was born a few miles from it and yet, I have no recollection of visiting the place as a child: to me, it was just another park, until, that is, I agreed to get to know it.

In 1882 I might have planted a vegetable where I stood, just as the ‘freemen’ used to do when it was known as the ‘Freemans Common’, before the freemen’s rights were sold with the Corporation Act. Am I any different, I wondered, to those ‘freemen’? For a price they were allowed to graze six cattle each upon the land. Now, we seldom grow a thing of our own but instead, for a price, buy packaged goods from supermarkets.

Earlier that morning, in the company of my friend, as my heavy legs caressed the crunchy grass, I felt like a free man. But I knew nothing of the masses of Army personnel, hordes of horses and the infrastructure to house the ‘Welsh Division’ that existed during the first war. It all formed before my eyes, while I stood, appearing alone but susceptible to my private lesson; the horses and their Jockeys punched divots into the fertile ground, while others grazed and carried soldiers to and from their tents and stables. As times converged I caught a glimpse of the words ‘Talavera Dispersal Camp', belonging to the period during the second war where another military barracks existed and extended southwards for a mile or so.

To the far-eastern side, I watched the present and the past slowly entwine; the ‘White Elephant’ public house, during the late 19th century, was the ‘Kingsley Park Hotel’, built to serve the more prestigious horse racing spectators. I was plunged into the centre of a race track. Among the din of the crowd I listened to how the area of Kingsley, which included the hotel plot, reached beyond the eastern side of the park and derived its name from its position as the outlying corner of ‘Kingeshala’ (the Kings manor). The excessively water logged soil meant horses slipped and slid into the crowds, crushing and squeezing the life out of them, while others screamed and fled. Such tragedies led to the end of the race meetings and, in turn, the hotel. It remained unused and empty for 18 years, until it became the ‘White Elephant’.

I turned slowly toward the south westerly side, where ‘Kinglsey Road’ joins ‘East Park Parade’, once ‘Gypsy Lane’ and watched a Romani family bring their caravan to a stop, on an earlier race day. The Victorian houses stood over them like spectators.

Opposite those, flickering in the light, I watched the ‘JADE’ restaurant morph into the old Law house. The park grew silent, giving me time to watch and listen as the executioner called out the names of the Culworth Gang and then, moments after, James Cobbett and a George Wilkin, found guilty of passing on forged bank notes. The jeers and cries for death chilled my bones more than the wind, and then faded away as the unruly march of condemnation rewound through the streets.

Kindly, I was given a reprieve and into my mind came the park as it played host to a Balloon Festival. It was a sunny day in August, a fun fair buzzed with excitement, hundreds of people had gathered to watch the mammoth balloons fill up with hot air and then rise up, and fly over the flat, hill-less patchwork of fields, drifting and rising slowly into the short distance, until all that I could hear were dogs barking. 3,500 ft from the ground it was deadly silent; not even the wind made noise. To prove if I was rising or falling, I put my hand over the side of the basket to see which way the wind was rushing. It was upwards, which meant I was falling.

The dark night closed in, the wind whistled loudly, ruffling the trees, blowing debris; cars scurried about like rats; it was 1998 and a murderer had just struck in the south-eastern corner, before proper lighting had been installed. The woman was in her 30’s, white, lying bloodied and naked in the bushes.

My short lesson was over. The sun broke through the darkness. It was still cold, but safe. The park is now a conservation area; a place of meditation for some and for others, somewhere to move through quickly, avoiding the shadows. Its spirit can’t be dispersed, only condensed and absorbed - it has felt itself contort under cultural pressures for hundreds of years and through it bleeds a faint reminiscence of history. A modest piece of sentimental land - a vessel, in which changes occur, like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, where one may see whatever face they look for, in any given moment. An endless inspiration when the terms are right.