A town’s park of lakes, groves and winding walks, with a carriage drive round it and villas on its edge whose sale paid for it; a plausible park modelled on Birkenhead, not a survey of it.
Birkenhead, across the Mersey from Liverpool, was a new town growing fast when its commissioners bought a stretch of marshy fields in 1843 and asked Joseph Paxton, gardener to the Duke of Devonshire, to make a park of it. It was the first park paid for by a town and open to everyone. Paxton dug two lakes in the wettest ground and heaped the spoil into mounds, ran a carriage drive round the whole and laid winding paths across it through lawns and groves; plots for villas round the edge were sold to pay for the work, and their owners looked into the park as the owners of a country house look into theirs.
Here the outer roads of the town run round the park, the villas stand inside them, each facing the park across the drive, and a road crosses the middle, dividing an upper park from a lower. Lodges in different styles keep the gates, Gothic, Italian and Norman as in a pattern book, and a triumphal gateway marks the entrance from the town. Inside are the lakes with their islands, a covered bridge, a boathouse, a bandstand, a cricket ground and, near the main gate, a formal flower garden of bedding plants round a conservatory.
The planting follows Loudon: trees and shrubs set apart, so that each can grow to its full shape and be admired, with foreign conifers among the natives. In 1850 the young Frederick Law Olmsted walked through Birkenhead Park and wrote that in democratic America there was nothing to compare with this people’s garden; in 1858 he and Calvert Vaux won the competition for Central Park.