Understanding historic park designs - HELM

Golf in historic parks
and landscapes
Understanding historic park
designs
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Understanding historic park designs
Introduction
Understanding the historical development of a site, its features and characteristics,
will help shape golf course designs or modification of existing courses. Most parks
are the product of more than one historic design phase, and expert advice is
generally needed to unearth the evolution of a park from its origins to the present.
Historic importance can derive from a site being an early or representative example
of a style of layout, type of site or the work of a designer of national importance; or
from having an association with significant persons or events; or from having group
value with other nearby sites.
Types of historic park
Deer parks (late Saxon period to the 1640s)
Creation of deer parks reached a peak in the 13th and 14th centuries but continued
into the 17th century, when many were disparked in the Civil War and
Commonwealth period. The parks were often not directly attached to a principal
mansion, but often had some kind of lodge.
Principal features:
• Generally either wood pasture, with trees and grass intermixed or
compartmentalised with separate grassland and woodland blocks
• Archaeological remains of park features such as park boundary or pale,
woodbanks, fishponds, warrens, lodges
• High levels of ecological interest stemming from traditional grassland
management and veteran trees (generally oak, lime, beech and sweet
chestnut, and almost invariably pollarded in the past, and others such as
hornbeam and hawthorn).
Formal parkland (1650s–1720s)
Up until the Civil War the primary function of parks was deer management and
hunting. After the war, new country houses and parks were developed and these
parks were increasingly ornamental and used for agriculture and forestry.
Continental influence both before and after the war encouraged a strong degree of
formality and geometry.
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Fig 1 Deer grazing at Bushy Park, West London, a 16th-century deer park with formal
avenues added in the 17th century.
Principal features
• Avenues of trees ranging from single approach avenues to extensive
networks, often aligned on a focal point either within the estate (such as a
lodge) or outside (such as a church spire)
• Main approach and sometimes a secondary approach for deliveries and farm
access; development of lodges; hard-surfaced (hoggin or local gravel) drives –
other avenues were simply grassed for riding
• Formal gardens around the principal building with geometry often linked to
the parkland planting
• Geometric water features
• Plantations, usually geometrical in outline and sometimes laid out in quasimilitary
formations
• Dominant linear views down the avenues plus lateral views over the estate
(whether parkland or farmland, grazed or arable) which would also have been
an important part of their enjoyment.
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The landscape park (1730s–1800)
From the early 18th century onward there developed a distinct English landscape
aesthetic gradually overtaking the more formal aesthetic of the previous century.
The key features of the English landscape style developed under Lancelot ‘Capability’
Brown from the mid-18th century onward, although Brown often incorporated
elements of mature formal planting in his designs rather than ‘sweeping’ it away. The
whole was designed to give the impression of a natural landscape that could be
appreciated particularly through the carefully composed series of views encountered
during movement through the parkland on the main approach and the ridings.
Considerable ingenuity and earth-moving went into Brown’s designs to create
naturalistic vistas and to hide unwelcome features, such as the surface of the
approach in views from the house. Many of these compositions are vulnerable to
erosion by neglect or subsequent planting so that expert analysis is often required to
identify them correctly.
Principal features
• Informal clumps of trees, single trees and woodland
• Perimeter belts and rides
• Irregular, natural-looking water bodies
• Entrance drives and carefully contrived drives and rides
• Informal but composed views from the main approach, from ridings around
the park and from the house’s principal rooms and entrance
• Designed views to eyecatchers such as a purpose-built structure or folly
within the park, a clump of trees planted on a distant hill top or a
neighbouring building
• Ridings often extended outside the park into the surrounding estate to
include views of farmland and more distant beauty spots
• Ideally the house appeared to rise directly from the landscape park, but more
often than not shrubbery walks or other discreet garden areas continued to
be valued in the near neighbourhood of the house with kitchen gardens
hidden out of sight
• Tree planting in parkland largely used a restricted palette of predominantly
native trees, such as oak, lime, beech and sweet chestnut, with only
occasional use of exotics such as Cedar of Lebanon – specialist plantations of
American and other exotic trees became increasingly popular towards the
end of the 18th century
• Plantations grown for timber, with oak extremely popular for its economic
and symbolic value
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• Perimeter planting mixed fast-growing species such as scots pine with the
slower growing hardwoods
• Sporting use of the park dictated the need for game-cover, with laurel, box,
and broom frequently planted as an understorey in woodland.
Fig 2 Stowe, Buckinghamshire, a highly influential landscape park.
The ferme ornée (1740s–90s)
The ferme ornée was a notable variation on the landscape park, affording landscape
park features on a small scale and combining landscape compositions with a working
farm. Most purely ornamental features and planting would be located around the
perimeter route.
Principal features
• A perimeter ride or walk partly or wholly within a belt of planting of shrubs
and trees
• Views inwards from the perimeter across mixed agricultural land, featuring
hedges and agricultural buildings such as barns and byres, sometimes
ornamented or combined with ornamental structures.
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The picturesque park (1790s–1840s)
The picturesque park evolved out of aesthetic theory in the late 18th century. It was
characterised by a similar framework to the 18th-century landscape park, but with a
less formal arrangement of views and vistas. Famously, picturesque improvement
contrasted itself to the smoothness of the landscape park’s forms. There was also a
greater emphasis on access into the landscape rather than merely viewing it from
key locations. W.S. Gilpin advocated picturesque improvement of regular clumps, for
instance by promoting the outlines of promontories and bays through using
differently toned foliage to accentuate the recesses. More formal gardens reappeared
around the house with Humphry Repton leading the way.
Principal features
• Plantations with highly irregular outlines rather than just informally placed
ovals and circles
• Areas of rough woodland or topography valued as visual features
• Increasing emphasis on composed scenes, but less on large-scale sweeping
views
• The house is framed by trees
• Reintroduction of garden terraces and other formal features adjacent to the
house
• Use of more unusual species for individual trees.
The Victorian park (1840s–1900)
Private parks
With the growth of plant-collecting throughout the 19th century, a far wider variety
of trees was used in parks often gathered in highly prized specialist pinetums and
collections set close to a mansion or detached house. Interest in the technology of
horticulture saw the re-establishment of the kitchen garden as a major focal point in
Victorian estates, while formal gardens flourished around the mansions. This last
period of large-scale park creation came to an end with the agricultural depression
of the late 19th century, while the impact of the First World War had a devastating
impact on the labour-force available to country landowners.
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Fig 3 Ashridge, Hertfordshire, gardens around the house laid out to the suggestions made
by Humphry Repton in the early 19th century.
Principal features
• Collections of exotic trees such as Wellingtonia, deodar and atlantic cedars
and exotic firs and pines
• Scattered exotics were also increasingly used as punctuation marks in the
parkland
• Extensive formal garden layouts around the principal houses
• Widespread avenue planting, often using trees such as Wellingtonia
• Rhododendrons, coverts and other features for game cover and sport
• Kitchen gardens with extensive ranges of glasshouses.
Public parks
From the 1830s onwards, local authorities began to address the lack of public open
space in England’s growing industrial towns and cities. In terms of acreage,
investment and design theory, the urban public parks of the 19th century represent
as significant a phase of landscape design as the landscape parks of the 18th century.
They are characterised by a cunning use of space to accommodate different uses and
character areas within a constrained space. Provision for sports and games was
integral from the beginning of the development of public parks. As early as 1835, J.C.
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Loudon was suggesting that ‘archery grounds, cricket grounds, bowling greens and
grounds for playing golf, skittles, quoits etc may be considered useful establishments
with a view to the health of citizens’. However, Loudon was a Scot, and although golf
had been played on Glasgow Green since the mid-18th century, in England there was
little call for it during the Victorian era.
Principal features
• Planted or landscaped sub-divisions to provide for different types of passive
and active recreation
• Formal enclosure with railings, gates and lodges
• Wide range of ornamental buildings and memorials
• Formal, highly ornamental flower-bedding schemes and wide range of treeplanting.
Parks from 1900 onwards
The last period of large-scale park creation came to an end with the agricultural
depression of the late 19th century, followed by the impact of the First World War
on the rural communities that serviced and maintained private estates. While the
Edwardian period saw an Indian summer in garden design, no equivalent in parks has
been identified.
The Second World War, with its requisitions, was a further blow to sustainable
parkland management as were the fiscal and policy changes, affecting everything from
agricultural support to death-duties, overseen by a succession of post-war
Governments. By the 1950s country houses and their parks were in a state of crisis,
and although there has been a renaissance in heritage sites from the 1980s onwards,
there has been no significant new phase in parkland design in the 20th century.
Public parks continued to be popular and well-maintained features of the urban
landscape for the first half of the 20th century. During this period golf – often in the
form of miniature courses, putting greens or 9-hole courses – was added to many
parks and seaside gardens. Reductions in local authority maintenance resources and
changes in leisure activities caused the decline of public parks in the latter part of the
century. More recently this has been reversed to some extent by the growing
interest in and funding for the heritage aspects of public parks.
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Fig 4 A typical feature of a public park, the bandstand at Southwark Park, South London.
English Heritage 2007
www.english-heritage.org.uk
www.helm.org.uk
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