Birkenhead Park

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"The Boathouse", an attractive feature alongside the park's lake.

Birkenhead Park is a public park in the centre of Birkenhead, Wirral. It was designed by Joseph Paxton and opened on 5 April 1847. It is commonly regarded as the first civic public park anywhere in the world. Paxton had earlier designed Princes Park, Liverpool, a private development.

It is widely accepted that, after visiting the park in 1850, American landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted incorporated many of the features he observed into his design for New York's Central Park. He wrote about the strong influence of Birkenhead Park in his book Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England, and commented:

"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".

Olmsted also commented on the "perfection" of the gardening:

"I cannot 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 growing every variety of shrubs and flowers, with more than natural grace, all set in borders of greenest, closest turf, and all kept with consummate neatness".

Olmsted described Birkenhead as "a model town” which was built "all in accordance with the advanced science, taste, and enterprising spirit that are supposed to distinguish the nineteenth century".

Other parks influenced by Birkenhead Park include Sefton Park in Liverpool.

Birkenhead Park has recently been the subject of an £11 million renovation, funded by the EU; all of the paths have been improved, trees and shrubs have been planted, the lakes have been emptied, cleaned and reshaped and all of the original features have been restored to their former Victorian glory.