London Library Magazine - Winter 2017 Issue 38

HIDDEN CORNERS

Park life

Travis Elborough rambles through the Library’s collections in search of books about public parks

As a cursory thumb through the OED in The London Library’s own Reading Room confirms, the etymological origins of our word ‘park’ derive from the Old French parc, meaning ‘an enclosed tract of land reserved for keeping and hunting deer and other game’ , or ‘beasts of the chase’ , as some earlier editions rather more colourfully phrase it. Writing non-fiction books has always seemed to me akin to quarrying a prey. The subject, once chosen, needs to be pursued doggedly, with books, articles and interviewees, winkled out of its hiding place, and trapped, snared and filleted for information. All of that research – and the subsequent composition – invariably involves a good deal of equally metaphorical wading through long grass, often to modest ends.

But a real pleasure of working on A Walk in the Park: The Life and Times of a People’s Institution, my history of public parks and green spaces, was the excuse it gave me to leave my desk and go quite specifically and purposely wading through acres of long grass, as well as ambling over neatly trimmed lawns and up serpentine paths. Another was, of course, the opportunity it provided for me to roam, like a literary big-game hunter armed with a MacBook Air rather than a rifle, on a search for books of a horticultural bent, through the stacks and shelves of the Library, an institution located on land that once formed part of a great royal hunting park. St James’s Park’s own colourful history of verdure, animal slaughter and foppish aristocratic sport can be read about in two books found in Topography, London: The Royal Parks of London (1978) by Guy Williams, and Neville Braybrooke’s London Green: The Story of Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Green Park and St James’s Park (1959).

The roots of such hunting parks are deep. Anyone wishing to go right back to the beginning would be advised to head to History. Assyria & Babylon, since the earliest known description of a park-type landscape appears in The Epic of Gilgamesh. This ancient Sumerian poem is believed to have been written around 2000 BCE, and the text was preserved on stone tablets from the Assyrian King Ashurbanipal’s palace at Nineveh, near today’s Mosul in Iraq. It tells the story of two friends – Gilgamesh, ruler of Uruk, one-third human and two-thirds deity, and Enkidu, a wild man of the woods previously given to consorting with animals – and their quest to discover the secret of immortality. The search leads them to a sacred cedar forest, forbidden to mortals. Well-tended, with winding trails and beautiful flowers, tall trees, sweet-smelling

plants and exotic beasts, it is – to all intents and purposes – a park. It even has its own keeper, an ogre named Humbaba, whose breath is said to be ‘like fire’ , and whose jaws are ‘like death’ . The Library possesses a few translations of the epic, including the original 1960 Penguin Classics edition by N.K. Sandars, and its successor in that series, the more recent and highly readable 1999 version by Andrew George.

But public parks as we know them today, with their familiar benches, flowerbeds, sports pitches and band-stands, arguably owe more to the Metropolitan Board of Works and other similar civic bodies across the nation than to ancient Mesopotamia. Like the Library, they are largely mid-nineteenth-century inventions. The degree to which they were inventions is emphasised in the title of another London Library volume, The Invention of the Park:

Recreational Landscapes from the Garden of Eden to Disney’s Magic Kingdom (2005). This informative, eclectic, one-stop primer on parks of all stripes by Karen R. Jones and John Wills lives at S. Garden. Inevitably this shelfmark, along with its capacious sibling, S. Garden, 4to., provides the happiest hunting ground for material on parks, park gardening – and park gardeners for that matter. Among its jewels are two of the most rightly esteemed general histories of Britain’s parks: The English Park: Royal, Private and Public (1991) by Susan Lasdun, and Hazel Conway’s People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (1991). Interestingly both were published in the early 1990s, when many of our public parks were in a rather poor state, having been abused by visitors and government policies alike for a couple of decades. Accordingly each of these books offers somewhat pessimistic views about the future of parks, predictions which, thanks to a substantial injection of cash for parks from the Heritage Lottery Fund from 1995 onwards, fortunately failed to materialise. But reading them more recently, with parks again in the midst of another funding crisis due to the curtailing of council budgets, there’s a depressingly eerie sense of déjà vu.

The fact that we have free access to so many wonderful pockets of greenery in our towns and cities at all is largely down to the campaigning zeal of enterprising figures of the Victorian age, such as John Claudius Loudon and Octavia Hill. Hill was closely involved with the Kyrle Society established by her sister Miranda in 1876, many of whose aims became the founding principles of the National Trust created 20 years later. Hill had seen her beloved Swiss Cottage Fields buried under ‘a sea of brick’ by a property developer. She therefore became involved in the ultimately successful battle by the Commons Preservation Society to ensure that London’s few existing open green spaces – the historic commons of Hampstead Heath, Blackheath, Epping

Forest and others – were retained for public use. Her contribution to urban greenery and much else is told in Gillian Darley’s vivid biography, Octavia Hill (1990), the updated 2010 edition of which resides at Biog. Hill, where it shares shelf space with the no less invaluable period piece, Life of Octavia Hill: As Told in Her Letters, edited by C. Edmund Maurice (1913). Words were a stock-in-trade for the Lanarkshire-born John Claudius Loudon, who was not only an inventor, engineer, furniture designer, horticulturalist, building and landscape architect and park maker, but also a magazine editor, publisher and prolific author. He made and lost at least one, possibly two, fortunes due to the vagaries of the book trade, and found love after reading his future wife Jane Webb’s science-fiction novel, The Mummy.

Her tale of life in the twenty-second century – a world which is plagued by an Egyptian pharaoh’s curses but one where houses also move around on rails and farm equipment is steam powered – had been published anonymously in 1827. Loudon was impressed enough by the book to seek out its author, presuming it was a man. He was pleasantly surprised to find the writer was a vivacious young woman of 23. The couple married within a year of meeting and Jane was to become his confidante and literary collaborator, as well as a distinguished horticulturalist in her own right. She went on to produce many popular gardening manuals, among them Practical Instructions in Gardening for Ladies (1841) and My Own Garden, or, The Young Gardener’s Year Book (1855), both in S. Garden; Bea Howe’s biography, Lady with Green Fingers: The Life of Jane Loudon (1961, Biog.), is also in the Library.

Unsurprisingly the Library has a rich store of the volumes written and edited by Loudon, sometimes with his wife, among them the 1850 edition of An Encyclopædia of Gardening, ‘improved’ by Mrs Loudon and ‘illustrated with many hundred engravings on wood, by Branston’ , located in R.R. Dicts., Gardening & S. Garden, a book to delight in leafing through for hours.

The Library’s near-complete set in Periodicals of The Gardener’s Magazine and Register of Rural and Domestic Improvement for Gardening, the journal that Loudon edited (or ‘conducted’ , as the masthead had it) between 1826 and 1843, is particularly significant in the history of public parks. Loudon used its illustrated pages to survey almost every aspect of the state of contemporary gardening, hailing, for instance, innovations like Mr Budding of Norwich’s ‘lawnmower’ of 1830 and promoting his own design for a glass hothouse. More importantly, its editorials, review pages and diagrammatic spreads offered him the opportunity to advocate the creation of hygienic suburban cemeteries, the planting of plane trees in London, and even, in an illustrated article entitled ‘Hints for Breathing Places for the Metropolis’ , a ‘green belt’ for the capital.

In various numbers he called again and again for the laying out of public parks and gardens where the English hoi polloi might freely avail themselves of health-giving ‘rational recreation’ , as he termed it. Loudon was finally able to put his ideas about parks into practice, initially with a long-since-lost public garden at Gravesend in Kent, and then subsequently in 1840 in Derby where, at the bequest of the enlightened local philanthropic industrialist, Joseph Strutt, he created an arboretum for the city. Composed of a collection of more than 1,000 trees, each of them individually labelled, the park was laid out over the re-landscaped grounds of Strutt’s former summer house.

The Derby Arboretum endures to this day, and is widely credited as the nation’s first proper public park, although that title is much disputed, especially if we define public parks as fully publicly funded and freely open to the public. The main sticking point was that Derby was initially only open free to the public on two days a week, and charged admission fees to meet its maintenance costs at other times. Nevertheless, its model, and especially its faintly pedagogical planting, was much imitated in the next generation of truly public parks. Loudon’s immense contribution to the greening-up of our cities is admirably examined in Loudon and the Landscape: From Country Seat to Metropolis, 1783–1843 by Melanie Simo (1988, Biog.). In the wake of his death, the creation of new public parks, aided by fresh legislation on sanitation and the expansion of local government with new powers to levy rates to fund civic amenities, would come on in leaps and bounds. More than 20 new parks were created in England and Scotland by 1860.

London’s first purpose-built public park was to be Victoria Park in London’s East End, designed by John Nash’s ‘favourite pupil’ , James Pennethorne, and opened (if not quite finished) in 1845. A landscaper, planner, architect and civil engineer, Pennethorne would also provide the capital with New Oxford Street, Commercial Road and another park in Battersea. His role in reshaping the city is the topic of Geoffrey Tyack’s Sir James Pennethorne and the Making of Victorian London (1992, A. Architecture, 4to.). Outside London, Pennethorne collaborated with Joseph Paxton on Prince’s Park in Liverpool, laid out in 1842.

Paxton was head gardener to the Duke of Devonshire at Chatsworth in Derbyshire and creator of the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition. His first solo foray into public park-making was just across the Mersey at Birkenhead (laid out 1843–7), and is described in Kate Colquhoun’s exemplary biography, A Thing in Disguise: The Visionary life of Joseph Paxton (2003, Biog.). But Birkenhead Park has a bigger claim to fame than being designed by one of the giants of the Victorian era. It also helped inspire one of the world’s greatest parks: New York’s Central Park.

Frederick Law Olmsted – who together with the English architect Calvert Vaux won the competition to design Central Park in 1857 – had undertaken a tour of Britain in 1850 and visited Birkenhead Park at the insistence of a local baker. He was astonished by the quality of its landscaping and the fact that the park was open to all classes for free, in contrast to the private and commercial pleasure gardens that then still predominated in American cities. Olmsted always cited Birkenhead as a major influence on his thinking when it came to designing Central Park. That park’s development and eventful life is described in The Park and the People: A History of Central Park by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar (1992, T. America, Gen.), while the rare Public Parks and the Enlargement of Towns (1870, Pamphlets 220) supplies a neat précis of some of Olmsted’s ideas about park-making.

One area in park design where Olmsted parted company with Paxton was the latter’s enthusiasm for so-called carpet beds. These are the elaborate displays of colourful bedding plants which are often arranged to form patterns, shapes like crowns or borough crests, or even to spell out messages and names. Brent Elliott’s Victorian Gardens (1986, S. Garden) gives a sense of their extraordinary variety and popularity in the age of steam and iron. Under the watch of J.J. Sexby, the London County Council’s first Chief Officer of Parks, the beds at Brockwell Park in southeast London, for example, displayed in floral form the opening verses of ‘God Save the Queen’ . Sexby subsequently wrote a guidebook to the capital’s parks, The Municipal Parks, Gardens, and Open Spaces of London: Their History and Associations (1898, T. London).

Sexby’s book is just one of several volumes the Library holds written by one-time park employees. These range from a practical manual, Municipal Parks: Layout, Management and Administration (1937, S. Garden), by Manchester’s former head of parks W.W. Pettigrew, to Gill Brason’s memoir of swapping the rat race and a dull 9 to 5 office job for a stint with Islington’s parks department, The Ungreen Park: The Diary of a Keeper (1978, Biog.). Similarly, Iain Sinclair, author of Lights Out for the Territory: Nine Excursions in the Secret History of London (1997, T. London), once tended King George’s Field in Mile End as a municipal gardener.

What Sexby’s book shows us is how much parks have changed, offering as it does a comprehensive snapshot of London’s facilities at a time when quoits grounds were still considered almost mandatory, and many lakes effectively served as washrooms for the poor. The vogue for rock gardening was also seemingly at its peak when the volume was written, with Sexby waxing lyrical in particular about Battersea Park’s ‘entirely artificial’ cascade. He describes this ersatz-Swiss water feature as looking like ‘a mountain-side … rent asunder by some volcanic eruption’ . That such an unlikely edifice could be erected in an urban park is thanks to the ingenuity of the Boxbourne-based family firm of James Pulham and Son. Former cement merchants turned landscape artists extraordinaire, they perfected the manufacture of ‘Pulhamite’, a form of fake rock that could be coloured and moulded to replicate the jagged fissures of the Eiger, or whatever else in the geological line was required.

Their services were sought by park authorities up and down the country until the 1930s but, rather like Polaroid film, the original recipe for Pulhamite has since been lost. The London Library possesses the definitive book on Pulhamite, Claude Hitching’s magnificent Rock Landscapes, The Pulham Legacy: Rock Gardens, Grottoes, Ferneries, Follies, Fountains and Garden Ornaments (2012, S. Garden, 4to.). It is a book illustrated with many curious wonders, and a reminder that some of the most natural looking elements in our parks are, like the parks themselves, entirely man-made arks should by their very nature compel us to think more communally, encouraging as they do the collective over the individual experience. They remain free and open to all, and we must use, cherish and fight for them to enable them to survive and thrive.