Reports of increase in aggression towards London park staff and volunteers during the heatwave
The City of London Corporation are urging people to treat their staff and volunteers with respect
Throughout the spells of hot weather, we've been hearing that park staff and volunteers are being subjected to an increase in aggressive behaviour
A lot of the aggression is coming from visitors being told they can't do things like light a barbeque on the dry grass
James St John Davis chairs the environment board for the city of London corporation, he tells us about why he thinks this is
"I think the difficulty we have is where you have large scale visits of people descending on a space, there is always the potential for friction and that, you know, throw in some drink and hot weather and you have a sort of perfect situation there for things to boil over."
James also highlighted one story that particularly stood out for him
"I mean, one instance we had was someone who lit a barbecue. Someone came over and said, we can't have barbecues, particularly not on the floor where we've got dry grass field. And the individual very angrily kicked the barbecue, so kicked it and the whole thing lit, over.
I think to me, that's an example of someone that clearly thought, I'm going to the park, I'm going to have a BBQ with my friends, someone come up and in effect in their view completely spoilt their fun.
I think that is the difficulty where someone then goes in the moment, I'm very angry, frustrated, kicks it over. Now of course that situation, if there hadn't been people on hand, we could have had a wildfire. That could have gone out of control very, very quickly"
As well as wildfires being a potential hazard in the hot weather, open water is another, James says often when staff and volunteers give instructions, they can be disregarded
"We've seen an increase in the aggression that is directed towards staff and volunteers. And I think another example, we've just been talking about sort of open water, staff and volunteers telling people that it's not safe and people saying, well, actually, I think it's absolutely fine and disregarding those instructions.
That leads again to just a breakdown of just good order in the spaces. And that can be anything from people just picking up litter in and around their site."