By the 1840s it had been decided that two factors would improve life in the squalid East End of London, the creation of  a public park and the creation of main roads driven straight through the overcrowded area. The latter now seems strange given that roads are now seen as a threat to health and […]

Two early contenders for the title of first public park were the Royal Victoria Park, Bath and Victoria Park (Vicky Park), Bethnal Green, East London (see the aerial photo above, taken from the internet). By the 1830s J.C. Loudon’s (s.p.b.) campaigning for public ‘walks’ was reaching a wide audience, particularly through his articles in the

The picture above shows the entrance Lodge to Derby’s Arboretum built in the 1840s. An inevitable question arises in this study ‘Where was England’s first public park’? As is often the case the answer is not simple, although for ‘pub quiz purposes’ the usual answer is the park created at Birkenhead (Merseyside) in the 1850s.

A very significant figure in the evolution of public parks was John Claudius Loudon, the etching reproduced above is from the frontispiece of An Encyclopaedia of Agriculture, 1844 (compiled by Loudon) and scanned from Travis Elborough’s A Walk in the Park, p.64. Loudon was the pioneer of a number of horticultural publications in particular as editor of the

The picture above (taken from Wikipaedia) is of Vauxhall Gardens, c. 1751 and was painted by Samuel Wale (another bird’s-eye view). Vauxhall Gardens was a for-runner of the element of later public parks that might be described ‘entertainments’, an element that the concept of ‘Walks’ (s.p.b.) didn’t really embrace, and today is replicated by such

In the centre of the Walks public park in Kings Lynn stands a surviving 15th century pilgrims chapel standing on a surviving section of the Medieval ramparts. This pilgrim’s chapel is related to the significance of the pre-Reformation ‘pilgrim trade’ to Walsingham, east-north-east of Kings Lynn (then Bishop’s Lynn). After many years of neglect it