On this day in history: First public park opens in Britain, 1847

Birkenhead Park opened for the first time on 5th April 1847. Designed by Joseph Paxton, it is widely regarded as the first civic park in Britain, and provided templates for many of the features that Frederick Law Olmsted later incorporated into New York's Central Park. Olmsted wrote of the park:

"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".

Read more on the park at the Wirral local government site.