A CONCISE HISTORY OF OUR GREAT PUBLIC PARKS

This lecture is a fascinating insight into the history of one of our greatest ever institutions – our Great British Public Parks This talk illustrates their origins from the great Royal Parks to the Pleasure Gardens of the eighteenth century, to their Victorian heyday. It discusses what makes a great park, it’s ‘parkitecture’ with examples of lodges, lakes, bandstands, fountains, lidos, palm houses and to their wonderful floral displays, to their great decline in the sixties, seventies and eighties.

Lecturer: Paul Rabbitts – Paul graduated at Sheffield with a BA Honours in Geography followed by a Masters Degree in Landscape Architecture at Edinburgh. He is a qualified landscape architect and celebrated park manager and has worked for several local authorities across the UK, currently Head of Parks, Heritage and Culture at Watford. He is a passionate advocate for public parks and in particular, the Victorian and Edwardian bandstand and is a prolific author on the subject. His first of now 25 books were published in 2011 on the iconic bandstand and was followed rapidly by books on the Royal Parks, Great British Parks and ‘Parkitecture’,

Image: Birkenhead Park – free to use from Wikipedia