Do not bring the park up to the walls of a house: give the house a terrace, steps and a flower garden in formal lines between it and the park, because the house is a work of art and must be joined to the landscape by art.
A park paid for by the houses round it
Lay out the public park with a drive round its edge, lakes dug in the hollows and the spoil raised into mounds, winding paths through groves and lawns inside; sell plots for villas round the boundary to pay for it, their gardens facing the park.
The Improvement Commissioners of Birkenhead, a fast-growing town across the Mersey from Liverpool, bought about 225 acres of wet farmland in 1843 and engaged Paxton, who had just laid out the private Prince’s Park in Liverpool on the same principle. About half the land was sold for houses, terraces and villas round the edge, and the sales paid for the park, which opened in 1847 free to everyone: the first park in Britain made with public money. Paxton’s assistant Edward Kemp stayed on as superintendent.
The design adapts the landscape park to a crowd. A carriage drive runs round the inside of the boundary; footpaths wind separately through the interior; two lakes, dug out of the marsh, have islands and boathouses, and the spoil makes rocky mounds that give the flat site its variety. Olmsted, visiting in 1850, admired it as a garden made for the people of a democracy, and took its lessons to New York.
Related rules
Plant each tree and shrub apart, with room to grow to its full natural form, so that it can be seen and admired as a specimen; prefer foreign kinds to native ones, so that the place is recognised at once as a garden, a work of art.
Carry the city’s cross traffic through the park on roads sunk below its surface, out of sight; inside it, give carriages, riders and walkers each their own system of drives, rides and paths, crossing one another by bridges and arches so that none need meet.
Place perfectly hardy plants, foreign as well as native, in woods, meadows, banks and the edges of water where they will thrive and spread without further care, instead of renewing tender bedding every year.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “A park paid for by the houses round it”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/paxton-public-park. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.