Abstract
The absence of enabling legislation authorizing towns to create public parks in mid-nineteenth-century England meant that the pioneering park “venture capitalists” were towns and philanthropists operating outside established government parameters. The impacts of sixteen of these bellwether pioneering parks were reviewed, and revealed a pervasive pattern of extraordinarily large, exuberant, joyous, and appreciative community responses to these novel facilities. Most of the parks were modest in both scale and the amenities they provided, but the unprecedented community emotional outpouring attracted widespread regional and national press coverage. This leveraged their impact to a wider audience which created a local community source of political momentum that had a substantial impact on a prevaricating Parliament and the national political narrative. The community’s support demonstrated they were valued as an integral part of the urban infrastructure, and they illustrated their potential for bridging the animosity and resentment between the classes.
Introduction
A series of reports and committees in the mid-eighteenth century identified urban parks as a desirable feature that should be incorporated into English towns’ urban infrastructure, but progress toward authorizing public funding for them was slow. The Parliamentary initiative was nurtured by Robert Slaney whose vision and unrelating persistence resulted in Parliament tentatively and reluctantly moving the enabling legislation agenda forward in small increments over a forty-two-year period beginning with the first official recognition of the need for parks in the 1833 Parliamentary Select Committee on Public Walks 1 and culminating in the Public Health Act of 1875.
The primary influencers in the transformation and expansion of the fast-growth industrial towns were the upper-class landed-gentry and the nouveau riche mill owners, because they had the voting franchise, possessed financial resources, and owned much of the land. However, for the most part, the governing classes did not take any interest in, or accept responsibility for, the condition of the poor or their relief. They ascribed evils such as poverty, destitute old age, unemployment, and filth to individual inadequacies, rather than to a general failure of society to alleviate the subhuman living conditions. There was an assumption that the working classes created filth and that the environment they defiled led to their poor behavior. Embracing this moral framework provided the rationale for the ruling classes to dismiss the appalling conditions as a problem for which they had no responsibility. Thus, Parliament procrastinated, and the pioneering vision and implementation of urban parks became the domain of speculative residential developers and philanthropists.
As the century progressed, more of the established elites recognized this framework was delusional. However, governments’ motives for becoming engaged in developing urban parks, for the most part, were not moved by compassion for the subhuman living conditions or from altruistic concern about social welfare. Rather, the emergence of the movement toward securing urban parks enabling legislation in Parliament was driven by two forces perceived to impact their exalted status.
First, the ruling classes were alarmed at the potential harm the working classes could inflict on them from diseases that were nurtured in the “rookeries” but spread to wealthier strata of society. The threat was confined not only to their contagion and consequent danger to health, but also to the costs of deaths caused by the epidemics in decimating incomes among poor families dooming them to the workhouses which increased the amounts the ruling classes were obligated to pay to support them by the Poor Laws. There was a belief that parks and open spaces alleviated epidemics, and advocates for urban parks were able to align with this concern. Their cause was considerably strengthened by the support for parks of the influential medical profession who believed more open spaces would alleviate the impacts of poor sanitation, overcrowded housing, and egregious air and water pollution. 2
Second, was a tangible fear that the scale of poverty and the social unrest sparked by a sense of injustice emanating from gross inequities in wealth distribution between the upper aristocratic and merchant classes and the working classes. might coalesce to threaten the established order as had occurred in France and elsewhere. The upper classes were reminded daily of the crime and “unacceptable” social behavior exemplified by endemic drunkenness, and the “unruly and uncivilized” actions of the working classes. 3 This led to the rational recreation movement which received great attention in the contemporary press. 4 The intent was to exercise social control by imposing ruling class values on the working classes and to “improve” and “civilize” them not by repression, but through organizing superior counterattractions to those of the public house that would foster desirable leisure behavior.
These were “top-down” motives arising from a desire to protect the existing class status quo. Fortunately, there were a few among the emergent merchant class whose actions were atypical of their peers. They disassociated from the callous indifference of their brethren toward the working class and “broke the mold.” The reluctance of Parliament to pass enabling legislation authorizing municipalities to spend tax money to buy land for parks, to develop them, or to operate them meant that progress in moving the parks agenda forward was dependent on the initiative and largesse of these pioneering towns and philanthropists.
Their efforts were mainly independent of, and unconnected to, the four-decade movement in Parliament to establish enabling legislation for towns to use tax resources to create and operate urban parks. Their local roots and focus meant their motives were qualitatively different from those that were driving the Parliamentary campaign. Their motives reflected reactions to specific local conditions rather than from methodical planning on a macro scale, and they served as “venture capitalists.” The magnitude of enthusiasm from local communities was surely surprising to many. It demonstrated that urban parks were practical possibilities, were valued, and they illustrated their potential for bridging the animosity and resentment between the classes.
Alleviating this animosity was specifically referenced by some of the philanthropists. They believed that parks would both “improve” the “uncivilized” behavior of the working classes and preempt them from morphing into a dangerous potentially revolutionary force driven by the social injustices and exploitation to which they were exposed, such as occurred in France in 1830 and 1848.
The “uncivil” behavior concern was noted by Joseph Strutt in his opening address at the Derby Arboretum: “If we seek to wean them from debasing pursuits and brutalizing pleasures, we can only hope to do so by opening to them new sources of rational enjoyment.” 5 Similar comments were made by other park philanthropists such as Titus Salt (Peel Park, Bradford) and Zachariah Pearson (Pearson Park, Hull). 6 The broader concern relating to the unrest growing into a dangerous potentially revolutionary force appeared to be an especially prominent motive in the creation of Norfolk Park in Sheffield, Peel Park in Bradford, and the Manchester Parks 7 because of the active unrest orchestrated by the Chartist movement that occurred in those three cities at the time their parks were created.
Engels
8
was caustic and scathing in his characterization of the lack of care among the emergent merchant class in England whom he described as the bourgeoisie meaning literally “the possessing class.” In the conclusion of his treatise he stated, “The living conditions in English industrial towns were the highest and most unconcealed pinnacle of social misery existing in our day.” He scornfully and cynically dismissed individual efforts such as providing parks to bridge the gap between the classes as token: What! The wealthy English fail to remember the poor . . . Philanthropic institutions forsooth! As though you rendered the proletarians a service in first sucking out their very life-blood and then practicing your self-complacent, Pharisaic philanthropy upon them, placing yourselves before the world as mighty benefactors of humanity when you give back to the plundered victims the hundredth part of what belongs to them!
Twenty years after Engels’ description, William Gladstone when opening Farnworth Park in Bolton in 1864 acknowledged the “mistrust and alienation” that the industrial revolution had created in the “general relations between the employers and givers of labour.” Gladstone recognized that many viewed the working-class factory population as “a debased population, and those who employed them a set of tyrants or of misers,” and that some had attached the appellation of “white slavery” to the relationship.
While acknowledging that “much more remains to be done,” he argued that in the previous twenty years the relationships had evolved. He pointed out that new laws had emerged (the 1848 Public Health Act, the 1859 Recreation Grounds Act, and the 1860 Public Improvements Act) and there was a wiser, a kinder, a more philanthropic, a more enlightened spirit on the part of the employers of labour; [and] a more orderly habit, a higher intelligence, a stronger confidence, a more affectionate esteem on the part of those by whom labour is given.
He suggested that the presence of the 30,000 people who had joined him in celebrating the opening of Farnworth Park was indicative of that progress in the relationships. 9
In several communities, the groundwork and encouragement to invest in an urban park was preceded by the positive reactions employers received from supporting and subsidizing “gipsy parties” which emerged in the mid- to late-1840s. Employees were given a day’s paid holiday to participate in day-long excursions, often by rail, to attractive places in the countryside, organized and paid for by employers.
10
Writing as a contemporary historian in 1856, a Birmingham newspaper proprietor recorded “quite a feature in the social history of the working classes: It is a common thing to see four or five hundred young people, with many old persons among them, and children too, dressed in holiday attire in “cars” or “omnibuses” with flags and bands of music, going out through the streets during the warm summer days to enjoy “agipsysing” in the country. The obvious gratitude and loyalty for their kindly treatment these trips generated towards their employers were impactful and doubtless served as entrées for urban parks.
11
According to a Birmingham Morning Chronicle reporter in 1850 the favorite destinations of gipsy parties were “Kenilworth, to visit the magnificent ruins of the Castle, and the Clent Hills, from which there is a magnificent panoramic view, extending over an area of sixty square miles.” However, of those destinations mentioned in the press between 1846 and 1855, Sutton Park was the most popular, followed by the Clent Hills, the Lickey Hills, and then by various rural locations to the south and east of mid-nineteenth-century Birmingham: Coleshill, Yardley Wood, Solihull, Knowle, Earlswood, Perry Barr, and others. 12
It seems likely that the obvious gratitude and loyalty for their kindly treatment which these trips generated toward their employers helped to heal the rifts in the social fabric of the 1840s, perhaps more effectively than speeches from platform or pulpit.
The Peoples’ Extraordinary Responses
A chronological listing of all England’s early parks is provided in Conway and Rabbitts. 13 The review reported here focused on the thirty-five-year period from 1840 when the Derby Arboretum was opened, to the 1875 Public Health Act which provided towns with the blanket enabling legislation to build and operate parks. It excludes those early parks that did not seek public engagement. For the most part, such parks were either carved out of the existing common lands (e.g., Royal Victoria Park, Bath [1830], Moor Park, Preston [1834], Southampton Common [1844], Woodhouse Moor, Leeds [1855]) 14 or were commercial ventures developed by speculative builders (in some cases towns) who invested in them to create price premiums on peripheral lots abutting the park which were intended to cover the cost of acquiring and developing the park. that did not seek public engagement (e.g., most of the early parks in London and Liverpool). 15
The evidence of mass support for parks from local people is drawn primarily from local newspaper accounts. It is fragmented and patchy, but it embraces sixteen pioneering parks. It reveals a remarkably consistent pattern of an extraordinarily emotional and appreciative response from the communities.
Today, the opening of a new park does not generate much excitement because parks are no longer novel faculties; rather, they are established elements of urban infrastructure that towns are expected to provide. In contrast, the pioneering urban parks in the middle years of the nineteenth century aroused great excitement because they were a new idea. To some visionaries who orchestrated their creation they were signature tangible symbols of progressive enlightenment in the evolution of urban communities. However, it was the extraordinary reception and outpourings of emotional support from the general public to these pioneering parks that gradually solidified their role as integral parts of urban infrastructure. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the consistent positive responses They did much more than reinforce the health, control, and social justice arguments that resonated with the top-down views of elite decision-makers. They were a demonstration by local communities of the value of parks as social institutions; they communicated to politicians the plaudits that could potentially be bestowed upon them if they invested in parks; and they created an expectation for collective action by governments to provide them on a large scale.
The pattern commenced with the 1840 opening of Derby Arboretum. It was an unprecedented civic celebration demonstrating support from all sections of the community that spread over three days and was described in detail by Hickson.
16
On day one, This memorable day was ushered in by merry peals from the bells of the several churches. In every part of town, at an early hour, the processes of decoration were begun to do honour to the donor of one of the most munificent gifts ever made to the inhabitants of a town.
After Joseph Strutt who donated the Arboretum addressed them in the center of the town, a procession comprised of 1,500 dignitaries from the middle classes led by a band headed through the town to celebrate a private opening of the park. After it was officially opened by Strutt, they watched as volleys from cannons were fired, and danced under tents into the evening. On day two, the working classes participated in a similar celebration. The day was declared a holiday and a large procession marched through the city to the park and was witnessed by thousands of spectators displaying their gratitude, delight, and respect. Approximately 9,000 people crowded into the park while bands played, a balloon ascended, and fireworks lit up the skies. Day three was Children’s Day, and another 6,000 people participated in the celebration.
The Arboretum’s appeal extended far beyond the town of Derby. The town was at the junction of three railway routes which facilitated easy access, so a large number of visitors came to see it and were made aware of the potential of urban parks: In other midland towns as well, open space was meager, [so] the Derby Arboretum served as a regional public park for some years. On Sundays, people would arrive in Derby by train, having traveled up to sixty miles or more in third-class railway carriages—from Nottingham, Sheffield, Birmingham, or Leeds—just to enjoy an afternoon in the arboretum.
17
The genesis of the three Manchester Parks, Peel Park (12 acres), Philips Park (12.5 acres), and Queens Park (12 acres) occurred in August 1843 when the city’s M.P. organized a meeting of wealthy residents to launch a subscription fund to finance the parks. Subscription funding was an alternative to philanthropy provided by a single individual. Other examples of its use to create early parks are Peel Park, Bradford, and Aston Park, Birmingham. It enabled a relatively large group of benefactors to aggregate their resources to fund a park and was consistent with the emerging business model of issuing stock to finance business enterprises. It offered community philanthropists three advantages. First, they could use their philanthropic capacity to leverage and engage with more projects. Second, it enabled the nouveaux riche who aspired to climb the social ladder to gain access to, and “rub shoulders” with, a larger number of the “greats” and celebrities in the community who invariably led subscription efforts. Third, the contributions of subscribers were passive. They were not intimately engaged or overly interested in the creation of the park which would have required them to invest their time and labor, in addition to their money.
In September, a month after the August meeting, a similar meeting of 5,000 working- class people demonstrated their support. The announcements of this meeting called on “every man who feels an interest in the improvement of the town” and “who knows the value of good air and manly sport,” and every woman “who finds her children’s sports restricted by the smallness of the house” to attend. 18
At a time when memories of tens of thousands of protesting Chartist supporters and striking workers demonstrating in the town in 1842 were still vivid, the potential of parks to generate considerable goodwill toward the wealthy was striking. For example, one speaker stated, “The richer part of our population has come nobly forward . . . residents at a distance who consider themselves indebted to our town have paid, and are paying, the debt of gratitude to us.”
19
The meeting’s leaders stated, now the richest part of our population, those who do not need the establishment of Public Walks, has come forward, has freely cast money in its thousands, working men and women must cast in their mites and work heartedly for the cause.
20
The openings of the three Manchester parks on August 22, 1846, were celebrated by a procession from Peel Park to Philips Park to Queens Park. The event was a source of great civic pride. The Manchester Guardian reported: “The bells of the churches rang merrily . . . while the closing of shops, the numerous open carriages, and the densely crowded streets, gave to the town the appearance of one in the midst of the celebration of a general holiday.” 21 A decade after they opened, Bradshaw’s Guide to Manchester noted their contribution to the town’s life: “They are the weekly resort of tens of thousands of our hard-working labourers and artizans . . . and form the most agreeable variety of something like green fields and shady trees in the vicinity of Manchester.” 22
Convincing evidence of their early popularity was forthcoming in the summer of 1847 when the Salford Parks Committee organized a census of Peel Park users for one week to count how many people entered it, and at which times of the day and the week. The daily totals ranged from 2,640 on Wednesday to 7,480 on Sunday and totaled 30,069 for the week. The Committee concluded these statistics showed “better than any other evidence, the use made by the public of this means of healthful enjoyments and recreation.” 23 The Manchester parks proved immensely popular havens of retreat throughout the nineteenth century, each park attracting as many as 20,000 to 30,000 visitors on a summer’s day 24 (Wyburn, 1996).
Birkenhead Park (125 acres) is widely accepted as Britain’s first municipal park.
25
Its opening in April 1847 was linked with the opening of Birkenhead Docks. They were both public initiatives, led by members of the Birkenhead Improvement Commission. A party of distinguished government officials from London traveled to the opening in five first-class carriages. The dignitaries were led by Lord Morpeth, who was Chief Commissioner of Woods, Forests in Lord Russell’s government and a strong proponent of walks and parks, perceiving them as being useful venues for engaging in rational recreation He was a highly influential figure. who in the following year was responsible for reintroducing into the House of Commons a Bill to promote public health. It became the landmark 1848 Public Health Act which was an important early landmark in the gradual movement toward achieving widespread parks enabling legislation.
26
The day’s events were featured prominently in the widely read Illustrated London News which reported: The facilities were opened with éclat befitting such an important incident, and a vast concourse of persons assembled to witness the ceremony . . . Ferry boats plying between Liverpool and Birkenhead the whole day carried 58,000 passengers at 2d. a head. The shops in each place were nearly all closed, and the day universally observed as a holiday. The celebrations were attended by vast numbers . . . It was a scene of animation such as the waters of Liverpool have never seen before, nor perhaps ever will see again, burdened with all the beauty of which both Birkenhead and Liverpool could boast.
27
At the opening of the ten-acre Adderley Park, Birmingham on August 30, 1856 a large crowd walked in procession from Birmingham city center to the new park. Civic dignitaries headed the procession but most of the gathering was comprised of multiple bands and working men headed by the railway carriage workers who worked in the area’s largest and most renowned industry and, according to the Birmingham Gazette, followed by “numerous bodies of the industrious classes in connection with the leading manufactories of the town.” 28 The Park was an immediate success. On the day after it opened it was “crowded with large numbers of persons, who behaved in the most orderly manner.” 29
Lord Adderley, who donated the park, noted its intent was to be a place where “working men could enjoy themselves after their toil and breathe the fresh air.” 30 He was adamant that the working class who were so supportive of his efforts should be engaged in operating it.
Consequently, he entrusted the park’s operation, management, and financing to sustain it to a Parks Committee comprised of eleven men, including Adderley, six of whom were skilled working men whom he believed were “high-minded and evinced the utmost desire to carry out what they saw would be a public benefit.” 31
In the following year, the opening of the thirty-one-acre Calthorpe Park, Birmingham, in June 1857 received national attention as it was officially opened by the Queen’s cousin who was commander-in-chief of the British Army. An estimated one hundred thousand people gathered to watch the opening day procession through the streets where “from every window and every parapet streamed forth the gayest banners.” 32 Lord Calthorpe who contributed the park was acclaimed by the large joyous crowds with shouts of “the generous donor” and “long life to Lord Calthorpe” and the Mayor of Birmingham declared: “This is one of the greatest occasions which the town has ever known.” 33
In the first seven months after it was opened Calthorpe Park received approximately 600,000 visitors. On the third Sunday after it had opened, it had between 18,000 and 21,000 visitors; on the next day, a holiday, “about 12,000”; and on the Tuesday, between four and five thousand: “the appearance of the grounds in the afternoons and evenings is most animating” enthused the reporter, “each visitor seeming determined on enjoyment . . . and the “majority of the visitors’ were ‘artisans and their families” 34
After the prolonged negotiations to acquire Aston Park as a public park were hastened to a conclusion by the intervention of Queen Victoria, 35 it received 384,700 visitors between its opening to the public on12 September 1864 and the end of that year. Table 1 shows the early popularity of Birmingham’s first three municipal parks was sustained, climbing from over one and a half million visitors in 1865 to just under two and a half million in 1874. This was an aggregate increase of 59 percent over a period when the population of the town and relevant suburbs rose by 19 percent. 36 Clearly, visitation numbers to the parks reinforced the contention that the people considered them an essential element of a town’s infrastructure.
Visitation at Birmingham’s First Three Municipal Parks in 1865 and 1875.
Source: Compiled from Reid (1985).
Ms. Louisa Ann Ryland was one of the largest property owners and most generous benefactors in Birmingham. Among her many benevolences to the town, she made a substantial contribution to the borough’s purchase of Aston Park, and donated two parks. 37 The first of these parks was the 66-acre Cannon Hill Park. Three years later in 1876 she made a similar gift of forty-two acres of land to create Small Heath Park, later named Victoria Park in honor of the Queen’s visit to it in 1887.
At Ms. Ryland’s insistence, Cannon Hill Park was opened without any public ceremony. Nevertheless, after the local newspapers announced the time and day the mayor officially unlocked the gates, a crowd of 15,000 showed up to watch the opening and explore the park. This caused the Birmingham Daily Post to affirm that “the great need for vacant spaces where the working population of Birmingham can enjoy pure air and find the means of recreation is so well recognized as to require no demonstration.” 38 and confirmed the necessity of providing public parks in Birmingham’s infrastructure.
At the opening of the 12.5-acre People’s Park, Halifax in August 1857 which had been donated by Frank Crossley whose carpet mills employed 4,000 residents: Workers were given the day off and people came from all over the county, with special trains from Leeds, Bradford, and Huddersfield. From early morning merriment was the order of the day. Church bells were rung and thousands of people, including 2,000 workers from John Crossley and Sons mills, joined the biggest procession ever to have marched through Halifax, gathering at Manor Heath and winding its way, to the music of 10 bands, via Dean Clough and the town centre and up King Cross Street to the park.
39
Several leading Stockport residents, inspired by the impact of Strutt’s creation of Derby Arboretum, approached Lord Vernon, perhaps that towns most prominent resident, and suggested a fifteen-acre site he owned known as Stringer’s Fields adjacent to the Woodbank Park Estate would be a fine candidate for a public park. When Vernon Park, Stockport, was formally opened in 1858, the mayor declared the day to be a general holiday. A procession of 5,000 people marched or rode in private carriages on a three mile, two and a half hour, winding route through the town. There were thirteen bands, church bells were ringing, floral decorations and flags lined the streets, and it took an hour for everyone to pass through the gates to the park. It was estimated “there were not fewer than 20,000 individuals present when the inauguration ceremony commenced.” The celebrations culminated in a twenty-one-gun salute, the Hallelujah Chorus, and God Save the Queen.” 40
Zachariah Pearson when mayor of Hull, donated the 27-acre Pearson Park in August 1860. The park’s opening ceremony was titled, “The Colossal Fete.” It was one of the most lavish events that the North of England had ever seen. A detailed contemporaneous description of the two-day event was provided by Smith, 41 and the following narrative is extracted from his report.
The site of the park was railed, huge balconies and galleries were raised for the spectators, vast booths and tents were erected, and numerous banners were raised. In the center ran a long and lofty balcony, from the middle of which projected a semicircular dais, on which stood the table upon which the mayor was to sign the deed of conveyance of the park to the town. The event was widely advertised and special railway excursion trips from across the north of England and the midlands brought 40,000 strangers to the town. Some visitors arrived by river and sea and no fewer than nineteen packets [small coastal steam ships] all crammed to excess conveyed 10,000 passengers to the town. At an early hour the principal streets were crowded; most of the shops were closed; and flags and banners poked out of very many windows or were suspended across the thoroughfares. A monster procession started for the Mansion House [in the park] from the Town Hall at about one o’clock. Along the line of the procession the streets were literally packed with human beings; every window which commanded a view of the pageant was crowded; and anxious spectators fastened themselves to lampposts and swarmed on the roofs of houses. The cortege was about two miles in length. It occupied about three-quarters of an hour passing any particular spot and before the latter part of it left the Town Hall, the head of it had arrived at the park. The end of the procession gave ordinary people a space to parade. All manner of tradespeople brought up the rear. We venture to say that the sight presented by the latter part of the procession will never be forgotten by the thousands who witnessed it . . . It was an imposing thing to see so many young men, mainly mechanics and small tradesmen. A second day of celebration, which coincided with Pearson’s thirty-ninth birthday, followed. Free entertainment and food were provided and the working class were encouraged to inspect and enjoy the park.
Farnworth Park, Bolton, was opened in October 1864 by William Gladstone who was then Chancellor of the Exchequer and who later became Prime Minister on four occasions. On the official opening day, the town was decorated for the special day with flags on public buildings and mills. The huge procession comprised of a military horse unit at the front creating room for it; followed by a large number of private carriages; followed by thousands of Sunday School children; followed by the non-profit “goodwill” organizations in the town; followed by floats featuring many of the town’s trades; all interspersed with several bands. It was half past ten before it started to move. It was a “monster of its kind,” more than half a mile long. It took three-quarters of an hour to pass any given point.
Visitors from all parts of the county came to the town: “The railways brought thousands from Bolton, Manchester, and other places; and it is not too much to say that there were not fewer than 100,000 people in Farnworth on that day.” Gladstone spoke at length to an enthusiastic, appreciative, and supportive audience that was estimated at 20,000-30,000 people. 42
Following the death of the owner of Roundhay Park, Leeds, and disputes among his heirs about distribution of the estate, a court ordered the estate to be sold at auction in 1871. The mayor of Leeds wanted to acquire 700 acres of it as a public park but faced political opposition from opponents on the city council who cited two main concerns.
First, it was far from the city and there was no public transport making it inaccessible to most people, so they argued it would be more appropriate to use the funds to purchase four smaller parks spread across the city within its existing boundaries. In testimony before a House of Lords Committee the city representative countered this perspective by pointing out that in Leeds “trees absolutely refused to grow because of the smoke, and sheep were ‘black or blue.’” Roundhay Park was three miles from Leeds but for “a park to be effective for such a town it must be that far from the centre” for people to enjoy clean air and good landscape.
The second concern was that it was too expensive. The 1866 Leeds Improvement Act authorized the city to borrow £50,000 for the purpose of providing recreation grounds. The city had spent £10,000 so when the Roundhay estate was offered for sale, the council had only £40,000 left to purchase it and the cost was likely to be much higher. To surmount this problem, the city would have to return to Parliament to seek authorization from another Improvement Act to raise its borrowing cap, but this would be expensive and could not be achieved before the auction.
The timeframe before the sale was only one month, and contentious opposition made its acquisition difficult. Consequently, the mayor, who owned one of the town’s largest manufacturing businesses, and three other councilors volunteered to act as brokers by purchasing it on their own security, holding it for an interim period until borrowing authority was obtained and then selling it to the council for the same price they paid for it. To surmount the political opposition and build public support in the two weeks before the auction he encouraged residents to go to the site and view it. Over 100,000 did so, and 40,000 signed a petition in support.
The public’s substantial demonstration of support persuaded the council by a vote of thirty-three to sixteen to authorize the mayor to proceed. At the auction he purchased one lot of 601 acres containing the main manor house, lakes, and landscaped gardens for £107,000, and a second contiguous lot of 173 acres, and secured one of the largest public parks in England. 43
The seventy-acre Albert Park, Middlesbrough, was donated by Henry Bolckow whose factories were the town’s largest employers. It was opened in August 1868 by Prince Albert, the son of the Queen and her deceased Prince Consort after whom it was named, and aroused much excitement in the town: Triumphant arches were erected at the principal crossings of the streets, banners and flags waved from every building, and all the external signs of rejoicing were everywhere displayed . . . The inhabitants of the town turned out en masse, despite the earlier threat in the day of thunder and lightning, and special trains brought many thousands of visitors from adjacent towns. A long procession of dignitaries, citizens and carriages led from the town center to the park.
44
Mark Firth, founder of a major steel company in Sheffield, donated the 36-acre Firth Park to the town. It was officially opened in August 1875 by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, and his wife Princess Alexandra. It was a memorable event well-documented in the local newspapers. It caught the city’s residents’ imagination and boosted civic pride. The town’s weekly newspaper, The Graphic, reported that the royal visitors arrived at Firth Park in a procession of forty carriages from Victoria station with the band of the Hallamshire Volunteer Rifle Corps playing the “Firth Park March.” They were greeted by a military salute and were seated in a temporary pavilion designed to look like a Turkish minaret, and 15,000 school children were assembled in front to sing the national anthem. 45
Leveraging Local Impacts to a National Audience
By twenty-first-century standards, most of these parks were modest in both scale and the array of amenities they provided so, ostensibly, from a macro perspective the impact of each of these parks appears to be local. However, this substantially underestimates their contributions. Their cumulative impact was much greater than the sum of the individual impacts. Although they were relatively few and their focus was local, they attracted widespread contemporary reports in the regional and national press which leveraged their impact to a wider audience. Their newsworthiness stemmed from three sources. First, they were novel events. Most large emotional public demonstrations were protests by the working classes related to their egregious living conditions that sometimes to violence and riots, but this was a wholly positive emotional outpouring.
Second, the early urban parks were sufficiently trendsetting and civically progressive that some of their formal openings attracted members of the extended Royal Family and senior government officials, which inevitably attracted the press and brought them to the attention of the wider public. Precedent was set in 1830 by the young Princess Victoria who opened Royal Victoria Park in Bath. 46 In 1858 as Queen, she reprised that role when opening Aston Park in Birmingham where she was greeted by an enthusiastic crowd estimated at half a million people and pronounced, “it is the finest reception I have ever received.” 47 She subsequently visited Small Heath Park in Birmingham which had been gifted by Louisa Ryland and the park was promptly renamed Victoria Park in her honor. 48 Other examples included the official openings of Calthorpe Park in 1857 by the Queen’s cousin, the Duke of Cambridge; Albert Park, Middlesbrough by Prince Albert the son of the Queen and Prince Consort: Firth Park by the Prince (later King Edward VII) and Princess of Wales in 1875. Senior government officials were present at the opening of Birkenhead Park by Lord Morpeth in 1847, and Farnworth Park by William Gladstone in 1864.
Third, many of the leaders whose visions created the parks were community leaders and members of the established elite, so they had broad influential networks beyond their communities. Thus, they were well-positioned to disseminate the successes to a broader populous. Several were mayors of their town: Joseph Strutt (Derby), Frank Crossley (Halifax), Zachariah Pearson (Hull), John Barran (Hull), Mark Firth (Sheffield), and Henry Bolckow (Middlesborough). Others were members of Parliament: Lord Adderley (Birmingham, also a member of the Privy Council), Frank Crossley (Halifax), Mark Philips (Manchester), Thomas Barnes, (Bolton), and Henry Bolckow (Middlesbrough) represented their respective towns in Parliament for thirty-seven, twenty, twelve, ten, and nine years, respectively.
In addition to the newspapers and personal contacts of community leaders, the outpourings of support were disseminated when they appeared as exemplars in Parliamentary Committees and Reports. For example, Edwin Chadwick in his influential 1842 report included an appendix, which reproduced much of the educational pamphlet that Loudon created for the opening of the Derby Arboretum. Chadwick proclaimed it was “deserving of peculiar attention,” as it proved “the importance of such provision for recreation, not less for the pleasure they afford in themselves, than for their rivalry to pleasures that are expensive, demoralizing, and injurious to the health.” 49
Implications
Progress in establishing urban parks as integral elements of public infrastructure was slow and patchy. The pioneering parks were innovations. While a prevaricating Parliament reluctantly and tentatively moved the urban parks agenda forward toward establishing enabling legislation in small increments over a forty-two-year period (1833-1875), a few pioneering towns and philanthropists who were atypical of their peers created urban parks outside the bounds of the prevailing political framework. Their local roots and focus meant that the motives for proceeding were responsive to perceptions of local conditions and local needs. The parks were bellwethers but they were “one-offs,” that is, they were not part of an a priori comprehensive plan for a system of parks in the town.
The mass support that emerged served to demonstrate their popularity and accelerated subsequent park investments. This support was especially impressive because the parks were not tailored to meet the needs of the masses who were confronted with three significant barriers.
First, the working classes lacked time and money to engage with the parks. They worked long hours, had limited amounts of leisure time, and were poorly paid. Second, the parks’ locations were inevitably opportunistic, that is, they were developed in locations where their donors owned land or where relatively inexpensive open land was available to be purchased which generally meant on the edges of towns. Thus, many of them were distant from the working class “rookeries” they were intended to serve, and there was no public transportation to facilitate their access. Third, their layouts were dictated by established elites’ perceptions of what was “appropriate.” This was consistent with the tenets of the rational recreation movement which focused on providing activities the ruling classes thought the working classes “should have” rather than what the working classes may have desired if they had been consulted. 50
Despite these limitations, their success in improving the quality of life of the working classes was indisputable. One fine day does not make a summer, and one gesture of friendship and benevolence did not stifle nagging grievances over conditions or pay. 51 These outpourings of joy and delight were small advances in ameliorating the living conditions which were so egregious that they could only be addressed by a holistic approach. Nevertheless, despite Engels’ cynicism, 52 the availability of parks provided a point of light and assisted in bridging the relationship and divide between the classes. Engels may well have been correct in characterizing such facilities as being relative “tokens,” but the excitement they generated indicated they were highly meaningful in the eyes of the working classes.
Although the early parks were mainly independent of, and formally unconnected to the Parliamentary effort to pass enabling legislation, the public’s response to them had a substantial impact on that political narrative. Gradually over the thirty-five-year period from 1840 to 1875 the consistent evidence of extraordinary public support moved the political needle that ultimately led to legislation authorizing governments to expend the funds necessary to scale-up the parks’ idea to the whole country. Indeed, an enduring political lesson from this phenomenon was that the ability to corral crowds of supporters and arouse emotional support invariably was a powerful tool for advocates of legislation.
In the mid-nineteenth century few could have foreseen the extent to which towns would embrace parks. Today there are over 27,000 urban parks in the U.K. and they are an expected element of urban infrastructure. 53 As Layton-Jones observed, “These early parks were ambitious and progressive for their time and without them, the large program of park creation that followed may never have been realized.” 54
Footnotes
Author’s Note
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The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
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