INTRODUCTION
BirkenHead Park was the world’s first publicly funded park. It has stunning scenery, beautiful wildlife and magnificent structures & holds the Green Flag Award and is a Green Heritage Site. The park has a team of Rangers, Heritage Gardeners and volunteers
- Visitor centre opening times = daily 9.00 – 4.00 p.m
- Cafe
- Tourist information Phone 0151 652 5197
- close to train station
- modern venue with function room / Gallery for exhibitions & product lunch events
- Education & school visits
- guided walks with Rangers
- Illustrated talks about History , Heritage and Nature.
- Presentation about links with New York Central Park
KEY DATES
- 1847 Grand Opening
- 1850 – 1858 New York connections
- 1997 150th Anniversary
- 2006 Visitor Centre opening
- 2023 Plans to seek World Heritage status
A BRIEF (but fascinating ) HISTORY
The Park opened on Easter Monday 5th April 1847 and provided a green oasis in an industrial urban area. It was the vision of the renowned landscape gardener Joseph Paxton. He was assisted by Edward Kemp who was an English landscape architect & author plus architects Lewis Hornblower & John Robertson. Kemp became the Park superintendent. The New York Commission consulted him and offered him the key Central Park superintendent role but he chose to stay at Birkenhead where he had a 46 year tenure.
- Grade I listed landscape
- Grade II listed buildings and structures
- styles and designs from cultures from around the world
NEW YORK CONNECTION
In 1850 American landscape artitect Frederick Law Olmsted came to Liverpool. He visited Birkenhead Park plus several other public gardens. He was greatly impressed by Paxton’s designs and the perfection of the park’s gardening and it’s social value as an aesthetic form in his words:
Five minutes of admiration, and a few more spent studying the manner in which art had been employed to obtain from nature so much beauty, and I was ready to admit that in democratic America there was nothing to be thought of as comparable with this People’s Garden.
I can not undertake to describe the effect of so much taste and skill as had evidently been employed; I will only tell you that we passed by winding paths, over acres and acres, with a constant varying surface, where on all sides were shrubs and flowers, with more than natural grace, all set in borders of greenest closest turf,and all kept with consummate neatness.
In 1858 he & Calvert Vaux won the competition to design a new park for the rapidly growing city of New York = Central Park.
OUR PARK
FUTURE HOPES
There are amazing and ambitious ideas & plans in place to continue to improve the range & quality of the facilities . Paramount is to further restore and keep the historic parkland & heritage features in good repair. Key aims will be to strive for the highest quality and obviously will take time.
- promote park’s unique significance locally, nationally and internationally
- provide a wide range of opportunities for volunteers re improvements / activities / events
- plans to seek World Heritage Site status
