I write with growing concern over the encroachment on the Queen’s Park Savannah — a heritage site that belongs not to any administration, but to every citizen of this country, present and future.
The Savannah has stood since 1817, when 232 acres were purchased from the Peschier family on the direction of Sir Ralph Woodford. It has survived as pasture, racecourse, airstrip, and finally as what Olga Mavrogordato so aptly called “the lungs of the city.” It is, by the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest roundabout in the world — a distinction found nowhere else, and one we are quietly allowing to erode.
A pattern we’ve seen before
Structures and car park facilities, each billed as “temporary,” have crept onto its grounds for decades. A Carnival Centre now threatens to replace the Grand Stand entirely, over considerable public objection. And this is not the first time we have watched it happen. As one resident, Maria Rivas-McDonald, recently observed online, a previous administration paved another end of this same beautiful Savannah — and the result, beyond the eyesore, was flooding. She raised a similar alarm about this year’s Independence Day parade grounds near the Botanic Gardens: if the concern is simply giving VIPs a dry place to stand, grass can be cut and temporary flooring laid. There is no need to pave a permanent road just so vehicles can drive in.
That question deserves an answer: what do we have against green space? Each incursion is defended as necessary, isolated, small. But precedent does not work that way. What is paved is rarely unpaved. What is built rarely comes back down. Bit by bit, we are trading an irreplaceable public commons for parking spaces and permanent concrete — and calling it progress.
Why this matters
This is not nostalgia. It is practical. Green, permeable land in the heart of a flood-prone capital plays a real role in absorbing rainfall that concrete simply sends elsewhere. It cools a city that grows hotter every year. It gives space to the cricket matches, the joggers, the family picnics, the vendors, and the Carnival itself — uses that depend entirely on the ground remaining open.
The Savannah does not need improving. It needs protecting. I call on our planners, our heritage bodies, and the citizens who walk its perimeter every evening to say plainly: enough. Let this generation be the one that held the line, not the one that let the lungs of the city quietly close.
Dennise Demming 