Designed landscapes are typically defined as places laid out for artistic effect or aesthetic purposes, somewhere to contemplate and admire. Yet many people have a much more active relationship with outdoor spaces, engaging with them for jogging, cycling, ball games, playgrounds and carnival rides. They are places to play.
This Gardens Trust series will examine the relationship between historic designed landscapes and organized recreation. We’ll be exploring children’s outdoor play, a world-famous theme park set among a Grade 1 Regency landscape, a Premier League football stadium that was once a Victorian pleasure ground, an early 18th-century estate that is now a golf course, and a Victorian public park which was opposed by local workers despite its claimed recreational and health-giving benefits.
This ticket (register HERE) is for this individual session and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire course of 5 sessions at a cost of £35 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 or £26.25). Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior to the start of the talk, and again a few hours before the talk. A link to the recorded session (available for 2 weeks) will be sent shortly afterwards.
Final Week: The 19th century saw significant growth in the creation of public parks. Increased urbanization in this period led to greater calls for green and open-air spaces to mitigate the perceived dangers of air pollution and poor sanitation, and a micro-history study of one park can provide broader historical understanding of these medical, social, and cultural contexts that led to their creation. Taking the case study of South Shields’ Marine Park, this talk will explore its history in relation to these main themes: the idea of the coast as a restorative place; nineteenth-century understandings of air pollution and urbanization with respect to public health; the role of ‘rational recreation’ in public parks (such as tennis and bowls) as a form of explicit social control; and class differences in popular understandings of health. In this way it will extend our understanding of the local as well as national contexts within which landscape decisions were made by intersecting the historiography of public parks with that of health and medicine.
Abigail Carr was the recipient of the Gardens Trust’s 2023 Mavis Batey Essay Prize for her work on South Shields Marine Park, the subject of this talk. A celebration of new historians that have excelled in the field of garden history, this prestigious award was named after Mavis Batey (1921-2013), the pioneering garden historian, conservationist and President of the Garden History Society from 1985-2000. Abigail is now in the first year of her Midlands-4-Cities-funded PhD at the University of Leicester, researching the 18th-century conceptualization of the English wet nurse.
Image: Marine Park, ©Abigail Carr
