Parks

Historical Background

The history of gardens includes traditions, practices, and forms that originate among the ancient Persians (The Hanging Gardens of Babylon) as well from those in the Islamic world, Japan, and China. The word park normally refers to a bounded area of land, usually in its natural or landscaped seminatural state, that has been set aside for some purpose, typically for recreation. The first parks consisted of land set aside for hunting by royalty and the aristocracy in medieval Europe, bounded by walls or thick hedges to keep the animals in and the peasants out. These game preserves evolved into the landscaped estates set around aristocratic houses and also served the purpose of proclaiming the owner's wealth and status.

Parks in Britain

An aesthetic of landscape design developed in these parks to reflect elite values and tastes where nature was considered enhanced by the interventions of landscape architects such as Capability Brown (1716-1783) and his successor, Humphrey Repton (1752-1818). Some of these original private estates and royal hunting grounds eventually opened to public use and form some of the most important green spaces in particular cities. In London, the former royal parks of Regents, St.James', Hyde, and Richmond Parks are now open to the public. In other European cities, formerly aristocratic gardens or royal parks (Lazienki Park, Warsaw; the Tiergarten, Berlin; Luxembourg Gardens, Paris; Gorky Park, Moscow, which was created by merging the gardens of the Neskuchny Palace and the old Golitsyn Hospital) are now open and accessible to the public. In London and elsewhere, there were commercial pleasure gardens such as those of Vauxhall, Cremorne, and Ranelagh; of these early examples of the amusement park, Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen (opened in 1843) is the longest-serving survivor. All offered amusements and distractions that were often considered disreputable or based on the principle of a com-modified culture of pleasure.

The development of the urban or city parks as they are known today—as areas of open green space that provide for free and accessible recreational use by the public and are usually owned and maintained by local government—have their origins in the nineteenth century. As the first industrial and first predominantly urban nation, Britain was also the first to consider the need for and to [Page 583]develop public parks as necessary green social spaces in towns and cities. As towns and cities expanded demographically and spatially to meet the needs of a burgeoning industrial sector, the cumulative result of inadequate sanitation, pollution, poor housing, and lack of medical services was documented by various studies, the most famous of which was by Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890), published in 1842.

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