At Home - Bill Bryson [148]
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Gradually it dawned on the authorities that what was wanted really wasn’t cemeteries that were like parks, but parks that were like parks. In the year that Loudon died, an entirely new phenomenon—the municipal park—opened at Birkenhead, across the River Mersey from Liverpool. Built on 125 acres of wasteland, it was an instant success and a much-acclaimed marvel, and it almost goes without saying that it was designed by the ever industrious, ever inventive, ever reliable Joseph Paxton.
Parks already existed at this time, but they were not like parks as we know them today. For one thing, they tended to be exclusive. Only people of fashion and rank (plus a smattering of impudently bold courtesans from time to time) were allowed into the big London parks until well into the nineteenth century. There was a “tacit understanding,” as it is always termed, that parks were not for people of the lower or even middle classes, however those rankings were defined. Some parks didn’t even bother to make it tacit. Regent’s Park charged an admission fee until 1835 expressly to discourage common people from cluttering the paths and lowering the tone. Many of the new industrial cities had almost no parks anyway, so large numbers of working people had nowhere to go for fresh air and recreation other than along the dusty roads that led out of town into the country, and anyone foolhardy enough to step off these rutted tracks and onto private land—to admire a view, empty a straining bladder, take a drink from a stream—could well find his foot painfully clamped in a steel trap. This was an age in which people were routinely transported to Australia for poaching, and any form of trespass, however innocent or slight, was bound to be regarded as nefarious.
So the idea of a park built by a city for the free use of all its citizenry, whatever their station in life, was almost indescribably exciting. Paxton eschewed the formal avenues and ordered vistas that parks normally embraced and created instead something more natural and inviting. Birkenhead Park brought to mind the grounds of a private estate, but for the use of all people. The conception was widely celebrated, but its influence extended far beyond English shores. In the spring of 1851 (that year!), a young American journalist and author named Frederick Law Olmsted, while on a walking holiday in the north of England with two friends, stopped to buy provisions for lunch at a Birkenhead bakery and the baker spoke of the park with such enthusiasm and pride that they decided to go and have a look. Olmsted was enchanted. The quality of landscape design “had here reached a perfection that I had never before dreamed of,” he recalled in Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, his popular account of the trip. At that time, many people in New York were actively pressing for a decent public park for the city, and this, thought Olmsted, was the very park they needed. He could have no idea that six years later he would design that park himself.
Frederick Law Olmsted was born in 1822 in Hartford, Connecticut, the son of a prosperous dry goods merchant, and passed his early adulthood flitting from job to job. He worked for a textile firm, went to sea as a merchant seaman, ran a small farm, and finally turned to writing. After his return to America from England, he joined the fledgling New York Times, and went off to tour the southern states, producing a series of celebrated newspaper articles, which were later published as a successful