The fight to save Liverpool's Calderstones Park

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.