Public parks and urban development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Nottingham John Beckett Department of History, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, UK
[email protected] John Beckett is Professor of English Regional History, University of Nottingham 1 Public parks and urban development during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Nottingham It is well known that Nottingham was one of the most densely built and overcrowded towns in Victorian England. Following the enclosure, 1845-65, green spaces, including public parks, had to be provided in the new suburbs. This article looks at the creation of parks in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to show how a combination of government policies, local authority commitment to providing open spaces and recreation grounds, and philanthropic involvement, led to the post-1845 town and its newly created suburbs having numerous accessible green spaces. This provision has, in turn, impacted on how the modern city has evolved, and the article suggests that this is important for our understanding of urban development more generally. The paper notes the impact of more recent development where large swathes of working class housing, with few or no green spaces, has been swept away and replaced by a significantly greener environment. Keywords: Nottingham; green spaces; Arboretum; Forest; parks; recreation grounds The creation of public parks, recreation grounds and green spaces in the newly industrialising British towns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a key part of urban policy making from the 1830s onwards. Perhaps surprisingly in these circumstances, the study of parks, as opposed to the study of individual parks, has not attracted as much attention as might have been anticipated.1 The key text is still Hazel Conway’s People’s Parks, published nearly thirty years ago,2 while the most recent 1 Roy Rosenzweig, ‘The Parks and the People: Social History and Urban parks’, Journal of Social History, XVIII (1984), 289-95.