History often denies simple answers, such as where was the first municipal park in Britain created? Three relevant texts; Elborough, T. ‘A Walk in the Park’ (Penguin Random House, 2016), Lasdun, S. ‘The English Park’ (Andre Deutsch, 1991) and Conway, Hazel ‘Public Parks’ (Shire Garden History, 1996) have varying opinions. Of the two words ‘municipal’ and ‘park’ the latter has a long history stretching back over a millennia as previously discussed; municipal means owned and managed by the local authority (local government), so which was the first public park to be owned and run by the local authority? Such parks could not have existed before the creation of local governments as we would recognise them, the exception to this line of thinking being commons or land of the parish where all residents shared some rights. With the declining significance of historic commons some early municipal parks were created from part or all of the common land.
As regards the ‘first’. In 1830 the very young Princess Victoria opened a small (by later standards) park in Bath, but as the land was leased, not owned, by the town authorities it only partially qualifies. Three years later the council at Preston, Lancs. opened Moor Park on open land that was not technically common land (and therefore didn’t need a permissive act of Parliament). This Conway argues was ‘the first of the ‘modern’ nineteenth century municipal parks’. A number of early municipal parks were sited in north-western industrial towns and Glasgow. Initially Moor Park had few facilities, more being added in the 1860s.
One of the formative precursors of municipal parks was the development in mid-to-late Georgian times of public ‘walks’. Indeed Parliamentary interest in public parks was focussed on the Select Committee on Public Walks. These have been written about before.
(to be continued).