Liverpool's Labour council wants to allow developers to build houses in the city's Calderstones Park.
You can read about the campaign to stop it here.
Local campaigners have been granted a judicial review of the council's decision, which will take place in November. They are now raising funds to pay the costs.
When I first heard about these plans I was reminded of a passage from that great Liverpudlian Alexei Sayle's novel The Weeping Woman Hotel:
Harriet recalled when she'd been a child in the early 1970s in Southport that a park had been a very different thing. There were big wrought-iron gates guarding the entrance that were firmly locked at sunset every night, there were substantial black-painted spiked railings all round the perimeter, inside there was a bandstand and a boating lake, clipped grass as neat as a Guardsman's haircut, a crystal palm house, flowers and stout native trees and a head gardener who lived in a little house by the gates and kept an eye out.
Not in this part of north London where she lived now; those into whose charge fell the open spaces during the 1960s were having none of that old malarky - they couldn't quite explain to you how a bandstand could be oppressive of racial minorities while simultaneously putting down women, they just knew it somehow did.Calderstones is a wilder park than that, but maybe its no coincidence that the revival of the Labour left has put it under threat.
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