Parkitecture: Buildings and Monuments of Public Parks

By Paul Rabbitts

What are the ingredients of our great British public parks? We often think of the wider landscape of trees, grass, lakes, meandering footways, bedding displays and herbaceous borders. But they are much more than this. Among the parkitecture featured here are bowling greens; bandstands; gates, railings and boundaries; fountains; glass houses, palm houses, winter gardens and conservatories; refreshments rooms; lodges and pavilions; bridges and boathouses; aviaries; children’s play areas, and statues, memorials and monuments.This book acts as a long overdue celebration of the buildings and monuments of our public parks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Amberley Publishing
• Release date: Jul 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781445665634

Paul Rabbitts

?Paul Rabbitts is a landscape architect and parks manager who has designed, managed and restored urban parks for over twenty-five years. He is the author of the only history of Regent's Park and Richmond Park and wrote Bandstands and London's Royal Parks for Shire.

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Introduction

What would appear to be an easy book to write in fact turned out to be somewhat frustrating. Why? Consider sending a child into a sweet shop with a single pound coin and saying ‘go and choose what you want’ with an unlimited choice. I had the same dilemma when looking at what makes up the ingredients of a public park and having to not only choose the parks, but also the many features within. Which ones do you choose? Do you choose your favourites? Do you stick to what you know? Do you choose the most popular? Do you decide to have a change and go for something a bit different?

Starting out with this book, I attempted to define Parkitecture and came up with my own definition: ‘Parkitecture – the basic ingredients of what makes a great park, from the benches we sit on to the bandstands we play on. They are the essence of what gives parks a sense of place’. I am sure others may have other definitions but these great landscapes that were laid out by the great Victorian designers, such as Paxton, Loudon, Kemp, Gibson, Milner and Mawson, and the municipal designers that followed, McHattie, Pettigrew, Sandys-Winsch and Sexby, all had one thing in common – the eventual introduction of architectural features within their parks. Parks historian Hazel Conway describes such features as either being needed for maintenance, those intended for park users, and those that simply were there to commemorate. They include buildings from royal palaces, mansions, museums, park lodges, palm houses and conservatories, refreshment rooms, cafés and pavilions; to structures such as pagodas, bandstands, shelters, paddling pools and lidos; to features there to educate and stimulate such as drinking fountains and clocks; and finally the plethora of landscape features including gates, statues, memorials, benches and bridges.

I have therefore attempted to strike a balance showing a good variety, some more obvious features and some not so obvious. One dilemma was a significant challenge – how to deal with the parkitecture of the royal parks. Here one is indeed spoilt for choice and such features would have dominated this book to the detriment of other worthy inclusions elsewhere. Therefore, the royal parks are represented, but frugally, and will be dealt with in a separate publication on the ‘Parkitecture of the Royal Parks’.

Our public parks are testament to so many and the heritage within is often significantly undervalued. The landscapes themselves are wonderful, but the ingredients that make up these great parks – their parkitecture – makes them magnificent parks.

Buildings in Public Parks

In the earliest stages of the Victorian parks movement, the siting and design of park buildings were the subject of two virtually opposing principles. The picturesque demand for variety, with buildings set within the landscape, vied with the classical demand for regularity and buildings that were the focus of their surroundings or terminated a vista. Some parks provided examples of both of these principles, such as Derby Arboretum, while some parks were created from sites already featuring large buildings and these, by virtue of their size, formed the main focus of the area of the park in which they were situated, but this did not necessarily mean that the landscape around them was designed to reinforce their importance. These included the palaces and lodges of the royal parks, from Kensington Palace and Charles Bridgeman’s designs centred on the palace, to Richmond Park and the terminus of the grand avenue of Queen’s Ride to White Lodge – a hunting lodge built for George l. Others included parks that evolved from the donation or purchase of great estates or grand residences, with Clissold Park in the London Borough of Hackney, the grounds of Clissold House, now a central feature of this great park, to Lloyd Park in South London and the mansion that dominates this south London park.

The majority of early park’s buildings up until the 1870s were generally small-scale and picturesquely positioned so that they were ensconced by trees, or lay low in a fold in the terrain, merging with their surroundings rather than dominating them. Towards the latter part of the nineteenth-century, a different attitude to the siting of buildings prevailed, none more so than in Sefton Park, Liverpool, where, as part of the design competition, it was suggested that the buildings should be positioned at points of interest and to close vistas. This included the subsequent introduction of the palm house and a grand boat house that had a commanding position by the lake. Abbey Park in Leicester was another example