Berkshire
Gardens Trust
Reg.Charity No.1201501

We are very pleased to welcome Paul Rabbitts, a Landscape Architect and current Parks and Open Spaces Manager for Norwich City Council, Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and chair and founding member of the Parks Management Association.  This very entertaining talk will be based on his thorough research into public parks and the royal parks and for his published books.

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This really is a fascinating insight into the history of one of our greatest ever institutions - our great British public park. We have all enjoyed them at some time in our lives but what do we really know about them? their origins? Did they really start in the Victorian period or do they go even further back?

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This talk illustrates their origins, talks about the need for parks, the Victorian heyday, what makes a great park, with examples of lodges, lakes, bandstands, fountains and floral displays, to their great decline in the sixties and seventies. However, the subsequent revival has led to a major shift in interest in our parks and once again we are much in love with them.

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This is a highly illustrative talk accompanied by slides with examples of parks from across the UK and their designs and architecture. This is a particularly popular talk and always goes down well as we can nearly always recount our own experiences with our own local park.

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Booking: Please book online before the 18th January. The tickets are £7 each for both members and non-members.  We will send you a Zoom link for the lecture a few days beforehand. The lecture will last approximately 1 hour, followed by questions.  The lecture will be recorded with the link available for a week to those people who have booked for the event.  

 

Queries: Kim Hacker at BerksGTmembership@gmail

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The pictures of Battersea Park & Forbury Gardens are courtesy of Paul Rabbitts and Reading Borough Council