Horticulture Week Podcast: Make Parks Sexy Again! – the joy of parks

Veteran, and very proud ‘Parkie’ Paul Rabbitts (currently working at Norwich City Council) fell into parks work after qualifying as a “really bad” landscape architect.

Finding “everything was going down the route of being computer aided design and CAD – that sent a cold shiver down my back” he thought “I don’t want to do this…which is one of the reasons why I moved into managing parks. Thank God!”

His latest tome, People’s Parks: the Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain, continues where the late parks historian Hazel Conway’s People’s Parks left off. It explores parks “beyond the Victorian era, right, through the Garden Cities movement, right up through austerity, Covid” and on.

“I just felt it was timely to bring what she’d done up to date but also kind of reinvigorate…interest in the kind of history and heritage of parks and why we have them, why we enjoy them and why they’re so important”.

Click on the link for more and listen to the Podcast!