Landscape Parks and the Form of Small Towns in Great Britain

Abstract

The occurrence and significance of landscape parks as elements in British town plans is reported. Parks in which medieval baronial castles form the residence are used to exemplify a four-part sequence of change in parks in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the concomitant effects of such change upon adjacent towns. This chronology is then expanded to formulate a general organizational framework applicable to all park-affected towns which, in addition, provides a qualitative measure of comparison between examples. THE landscape park's 'fundamental characteristic of spaciousness was impossible near a town'. So wrote Maurice Beresford in an essay on parks published in 1957;1 yet even the most cursory glance through the plans of the 1:25 000 series of the Ordnance Survey reveals many towns which have one or more landscape parks adjacent to, or even intruding into, their urban fabric. The early nineteenth-century printed maps of Britain provide similar evidence of places where the association of park and town has not continued to the present day. In all, the available cartographic evidence reveals a total of some 400 towns in Great Britain which have, or have had, a park as one element of their town plan. It is the aim of this paper to analyse the effects of one phase of the history of parks on the form of adjacent small towns; namely that period between the 1720os and the early nineteenth century when parks were being re-designed in the landscape mode. DISTRIBUTION AND CHARACTERISTICS In some areas towns with parks form a substantial proportion of the total number of towns in the region. This is most evident amongst the market towns of the Home Counties, but this is not entirely unexpected in view of the known concentration of parks in this region.2 In all, nearly one-third of all towns with adjacent parks are to be found in south-east England. Some towns in this area, Henley-on-Thames, Beaconsfield and Sevenoaks, for example, have as many as three large landscape parks in their immediate environs, as well as numbers of smaller ornamental villa estates. Other areas, most notably East Anglia and Devon and Cornwall, have few examples of such park-affected towns since they were dominated in their land ownership and social structure by the yeomanry and gentry. These smaller landowners, though responsible for some lesser landscape parks in the eighteenth century, generally concentrated their resources upon agrarian improvement before the 1820s.3 In more detail, some interesting groups of similar examples emerge. The small towns of the Tweed drainage basin in Scotland, for instance, each have one or two parks adjoining whose ownership and design chronology compare closely. A second group, distinguished by their owners rather than their location, are those landscape parks created by the successful entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution. Such men often built their mansions and planted their parks to overlook the industry and associated urban development which was the basis of their