Peoples Parks - a Concise History
Paul Rabbitts fascinating insight into the history of one of our greatest ever institutions - our Great British Public Park - People’s Parks. We have all enjoyed them at some time in our lives but what do we really know about them? their origins? did they really start in the Victorian period or do they go back even further? This Gardens Trust talk illustrates their origins, the need for parks, their Victorian heyday, what makes a great park, with examples of lodges, lakes, bandstands, fountains and floral displays, to their great decline in the sixties and seventies. However, the subsequent revival has led to a major shift in interest in our parks and once again we are much in love with them.This first session will follow the blossoming of the amazing 2,000-year-old story of why we have gardens at all. This is a fascinating tale of how they grew in the Roman world to become so much more than a productive space by a house. As the Empire expanded and the ordinary people aspired to have show-off homes, the gardens rapidly became a work of art in themselves. Now, for the first time in history, they became the personal creative spaces we know and love today. You’ll be astonished at how much the Romans have shaped our modern gardens today: from practical suppliers of food to homely open spaces and grand vistas and landscapes. They all have fascinating ancient roots that reveal how gardens came to be our own social, spiritual and physical spaces. Greenery, space, status, pleasure and fun, places of togetherness and of meditative solitude … all these aspects have truly ancient roots.
Time: 18:00 BST
