The portion of Blackheath north of the A2 is managed by Greenwich Council and the portion south of the A2 by Lewisham Council. There is also a Management Committee, in which amenity societies have a say, which looks at common issues. Yet Blackheath is managed as 'typical London park', which is no compliment. There is no sense of it being a famous meeting place for kings, rebels and preachers. One scarcely appreciates that it is a hilltop which once had great views over London and Kent. Mostly, one notices traffic on the main road from Kent to London and an expanse of under-used football pitches. There are lorry-parks, coach-parks and examples of wretched landscape detailing.
Blackheath is an ancient common, dating from the middle ages when a common was an area belonging to the Lord of the Manor in which local people had defined rights. After the agricultural revolution of the 17th and 18th centuries these rights were progressively eroded. The Lord of the Manor’s attempt to enclose Blackheath was frustrated. It was ‘secured for public use in perpetuity by the London County Council in 1871’. The Act of Parliament which transferred the land to the Metropolitan Board of Works specified that the Board should ‘preserve the turf, gorse, fern, and grass’ and ‘shall do nothing that shall otherwise alter or vary the natural features or aspect of the Heath’.9 Despite this strict injunction the London County Council, as successor to the Board, converted most of Blackheath to flat grass for organized sport. Under the provisions of the 1871 Act, tenants of the manors of Lewisham, East Greenwich, and West Combe retained ‘the right of cutting heather, furze, underwood, and turf for fuel, and of digging gravel under certain restrictions’. In 1944 the Blackheath Society protested about ‘the continued process of filling in the gravel pits on Blackheath with every kind of rubble from bombed sites’, and reminded the London County Council that they were used for periodical fairs, religious services, bonfires, and tobogganing, and ‘also served as sheltered playgrounds for informal games of every kind, by large numbers of young people who took no part in organized games’. The historic rights lapsed and Blackheath is now predominantly an expanse of gang-mown grass. Only the right of access was secured in perpetuity. No modern poet would write, as John Clare did of:
Ye commons left free in the rude rags of nature,
Ye brown heaths be clothed in furze as ye be,
My wild eye in rapture adores every feature,
Ye are dear as this heart in lily bosom to me.
According to Hoskins, ‘millions of acres’ of common land were enclosed and ‘in most places this legalized theft was carried through without any active threat from the illiterate and cowed small peasantry, who rarely had a leader in their cause’.
