IT'S a green lung, according to Roger Wools. While that might sound like an unpleasant complaint, the sort of agricultural ailment Joe Grundy suffers in The Archers, Roger is certainly right.

Bootham Park Hospital and the land on which it sits constitute an important part of York. To those of us in the Groves, Bootham Park is a wonderful place to walk, cycle or run through. I've done all three, possibly even on the same day.

York, for all its beauties, is a crowded city and Bootham Park is a rare splash of green, an oasis of surprising calm, when you consider it has a railway line on one side and a traffic-clogged road on the other.

A walk through Bootham Park offers a circuitous route into York, keeping well away from the noise and fumes of Gillygate. If this open space were ever lost, the only undeveloped land left in the vicinity would be the private and enclosed playing fields belonging to Bootham School.

Now at the moment, no one is saying there is any threat to Bootham Park at all. But the fact that York Health Services Trust is looking into the future of Bootham Park Hospital should unsettle everyone who likes this open space.

It is true that I don't come armed with inside information. For all I know, whatever happens to the hospital there might be no risk of anyone ever building on this rare and valuable tract of open land. It's just that, how often does open land stay that way?

Perhaps no one will ever apply to erect expensive houses on part of Bootham Park, and perhaps everything will remain as peaceful as it is today. In which case, my worries will be proved spectacularly wrong, and that'll be that, thank heavens.

Roger Wools, chairman of the Bootham and Clifton Conservation Group, told our reporter that Bootham Park was "a great green lung within the city of York. It's amazing how it's survived and it's so important that it's kept".

How true. As for the building, Bootham Park Hospital, which is Grade 1 listed, was designed by the great York architect John Carr. It was built, as the County Lunatic Asylum, between 1774 and 1777. A last-minute financial crisis threatened the project, and in May 1777 "it was reported that the building could not be completed without more funds" (The Life And Works Of John Carr of York, by Brian Wragg, Oblong Books).

In a way, it is comforting to see that great works ran into trouble in those days as they still do today. Anyway, an extra £2,000 was raised in subscriptions, bringing the total to £6,252, 18s, and in November 1777, the building was completed.

And it still stands today, apparently unchanged, although in fact the hospital originally had a dome and a turret, which were removed in 1939 and 1951.

To borrow a handy old newspaper clich, watch this space.

YOU can tell there's an election in the air. The Prime Minister has gone back to school and William Hague is handing out leaflets at home time. As the two main parties squabble in the playground over who is promising the greatest improve-ments to secondary schools, it is possible to wonder what good will come from all this.

Tony Blair wants to end the day of the "bog standard comprehensive", to use his spokesman's unfortunate phrase, by introducing specialist schools, while also handing schools over to religious groups, which seems odd in these secular days.

And William Hague, flicking through the pages of the Tory Party's dusty book of new ideas, has come up with a creaky call to restore grammar schools.

What both of them seem to forget is that their proposed 'improvements' risk recreating the old two-tier system, under which some pupils flourished and others were put in the failure pen. It doesn't sound much like progress to me.