Twenty years had passed since I was last in Copenhagen long enough to stroll through the world's loveliest pleasure gardens. But Tivoli was just as I remembered it. Of course it was. Why should it have changed, after 165 years of delighting Danes and visitors alike?

Shouts of glee, rather than screams of terror, came from the direction of the 1914 wooden roller-coaster - for everything at Tivoli is designed to delight the senses, not scare the pants off punters. On the bandstand a little orchestra of 16 musicians, their music heroically anchored by clothespegs, tickled the ears of dozing grannies with waltzes and overtures redolent of a gentler, more gracious era.

Young mothers jiggled baby-buggies in the rose gardens. Waitresses dispensed huge dollops of extraordinary, liquor-flavoured ice cream (two scoops and you feel light-headed) from ancient kiosks where precisely the same flavours of ice-cream have been dispensed for the past century. Meanwhile, on the open-air stage, armies of Danish maidens, of all shapes and sizes, performed stirring (and, in some cases, highly improbable) gymnastic routines.

It was 5pm last Tuesday. Had I been able to linger for a few more hours I would have seen the hanging lanterns turning the tinkling fountains into magical spumes of pink and blue. Tivoli's four theatres, offering everything from puppets to pop (Sting, Jamie Cullen and the Smashing Pumpkins have all played there), would have burst into life. Its elegant restaurants would have laid out their finest smorgasbords, and the mouth-watering aroma of smoked herring would have drifted down the tree-lined promenades.

Two emotions struck me as I surveyed this scene. The first was intense nostalgia, and I knew instantly what caused it. Watching the little orchestra took me back 40 years. Recruited to play second trombone in my dad's brass band, I would spend almost every Sunday of my boyhood oompahing selections from The King and I and suchlike on park bandstands. It was oddly character-forming. The Greater London Council (as it then was) would pay us about thruppence to provide this service, but only if we completed our programme, no matter what. If I live to be 130, I will never erase the memory of trying to pump out Oh What a Beautiful Morning as a lacerating hailstorm sent my music flying into the boating lake.

The other emotion I felt in Tivoli, however, was more complex and unexpected. It was a mixture of envy and a strange anger. The sight of so many people enjoying an antique pleasure garden should have struck me as a bizarre anachronism. Indeed, Tivoli's attractions lag so far behind the gravity-defying thrill-machines of British themeparks that they don't even seem to belong in the same universe.

But that is exactly why I found the place so irresistible. Yes, it has modernised to some extent. Two years ago it acquired the world's tallest carousel. But it hasn't turned itself into a Disney World clone, as every British amusement park has. And it hasn't slavishly subscribed to the philosophy of instant obsolescence that now drives the leisure industries of Britain and America: the notion that anything over a year old (whether an iPod, a TV or a roller-coaster) must constantly be “upgraded” to something even faster, louder or bigger.

And this is what made me angry. What Tivoli stands for, it strikes me, is a deeply-ingrained resistance to the frenzied concept of “progress for progress's sake”. It's a resistance that is often found in mainland Europe. But it has been ridiculed out of existence in Britain, and we are the worse for it. We have let ourselves become so dazzled by the synthetic allure of convenience, speed and technological innovation that we no longer have much regard for the quieter, civilised values that so enrich ordinary lives, given half a chance. Qualities such as graciousness, tranquillity, craftsmanship, conservation and conversation.

That's the reason why we have thousands of identical supermarkets, each selling an identical range of foodstuffs, while mainland Europe still has butchers, bakers and cheese shops. It's why we have raucous “themed” pubs full of puking adolescents, or multinational coffee chains selling outrageously priced lattes in every mall, while Europe has cafés and bars that ooze character and a sense of place. It's why we have gridlocked motorways, while they have old-fashioned trams and trains that run on time in all weathers.

It's strange that one has to step outside a place in order to see its absurdities. If you live in Britain it now seems natural, even inevitable, that every town should have three Tescos, five Starbucks and a perpetual traffic jam round its ring road. “That's progress!” we exclaim. We may be speaking ironically, but the progress seems unstoppable all the same. It's only when you arrive in mainland Europe that you realise that things don't have to change for the worse, just for the sake of change.

In the end, it's a question of charm. How much do we care about charm in our daily lives and urban environments? How much are we prepared to fight to protect this charm from rampages by profit-crazed developers?

The Danes care very much. The fate of an amusement park may seem trivial in a world riddled with famine, poverty and war. But there's something supremely symbolic and exemplary about their protection of Tivoli. In 1943, when the Danish resistance to German occupation was growing ever bolder and braver, the Nazis tried to crush the morale of the nation by burning much of Tivoli to the ground. Within weeks the Danes had rebuilt and reopened it. I doubt whether, in similar circumstances, people would care that passionately about Alton Towers.

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