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

The Walks, Kings Lynn has been designated by English Heritage a Grade two historic park and is ‘the only surviving 18th century town walk in Norfolk’ (quote from the homepage of the Friends of the Walks website). The 42 acre site has benefitted recently from a thorough restoration funded by the Heritage Lottery. The western

Years ago public parks were often characterised by the sign ‘Keep off the Grass’. The reasons for this rather disappointing instruction were clear – in either very dry or very wet weather the grass could be so trampled that when the weather improved the grass was unable to grow again. Also discarded items might damage