Breaking: Sadiq Khan is a big fan of grass – and not the kind you can decriminalise. The Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority have been forced to shell out a whopping £200,000 to re-turf Parliament Square Gardens – a site often favoured by the unwashed masses of eco-protestors like Extinction Rebellion. City Hall cited the impact of ‘continued high footfall’ as one of the reasons why the grassed area struggled to recover last autumn, alongside the ‘hot weather and hose pipe ban’ that summer.
A breakdown of figures in response to a Freedom of Information request seen by Mr S showed that the re-turfing of Parliament Square cost £183,000 alongside a further £16,000 due to ‘the complex logistics of working in a sensitive central London location.’ For context, the Greater London Authority usually only spends £24,000 per annum on horticultural and arboricultural maintenance of the gardens – meaning that was more spent in March of this year than eight years of annual budgets.
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